Wikimedia – Faster Than 20

Everybody Is People

Many years ago, a colleague, Nick Papadopoulos, told me about a complex negotiation he was asked to facilitate between a large corporation and a community of angry activists. They had met several times without external facilitation and were not making progress. Nick practiced Dialogue Mapping, a visual facilitation technique for mapping complex issues in real-time, and he had other sophisticated skills in his toolbelt as well.

The first meeting he attended started at 8am on a Saturday morning in one of the company’s conference rooms. When he arrived, there was no food or coffee. The meeting began, and people were predictably grouchy. The issues they were discussing were political and personal, and they were also discussing them on an empty stomach.

As it turned out, Nick’s wife had just started a catering business. At the next meeting, he brought a tray of her muffins. The tenor of the discussion shifted noticeably, and he started doing this regularly. Several weeks later, after he had successfully brought the negotiation to a close, several of the participants came up to him and told him how much they enjoyed his wife’s muffins.

I wasn’t at any of those meetings. I have no idea what role the food actually played in Nick’s success. He is both modest and skilled, and that probably mattered more than the food in the end. However, for me, his insight about the food was part of what made him skilled. I’m sure it played a significant role in his success.

Why am I so sure?

Everybody is people.

It’s likely that most people have not yet eaten at an 8am meeting on a Saturday morning. People need food in their systems to be at their best. People like tasty food, especially the homemade kind, which reminds us of family, of people we love, of our humanity. When the topic of conversation is controversial and complex, people need to be at their best. Depriving them of food — consciously or not — is not a good idea. Reminding them of their and each other’s humanity is an excellent idea.

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget. We get so caught up in complexity that we forget simple, important things. Things like everybody is people.

I led the Wikimedia open strategy process from 2009 through 2010. We had over a thousand people from all over the world participate, mostly virtually. It’s not the hardest project I’ve worked on, but a lot of people still marvel at it. They wonder how we were able to get so many people to volunteer their time and to work together so constructively, especially without seeing each other. The answer was simple.

Everybody is people.

The fact that we were working mostly virtually didn’t change the fact that we were dealing with people, and people have certain basic needs. We did three things that are often overlooked, because they were so simple and the project was so complex, people have a hard time believing they were that important.

First, we took the time to individually welcome every single person who showed up. Everyone.

This is the simplest thing that you can do in any online forum (and in any face-to-face meeting), regardless of the tool you’re using. There happens to be lots of data showing that welcoming people when they show up is one of the best ways to improve engagement. But really, do we need the data to justify this? Welcoming people is a simple way to establish a relationship, to show people that they are seen and appreciated.

Second, we held virtual office hours once a week for the entire year. We alternated the times to make them convenient for people in different timezones, which meant that every other week, we were up late at night talking to people. We happened to be using a tool called IRC, which is an ancient real-time chatting tool that Wikipedians like to use, but it would have worked with any tool.

These were not meetings, and there were no agendas. The sole purpose was to hang out with me and Philippe Beaudette, our facilitator. We wanted to meet people, to get to know them, and to listen to what they had to say. We also wanted to invite others to do the same with us.

People came. They were often surprised by the lack of formality. They expected us to be guarded or to have agendas. We answered questions, sometimes in great detail (I can get very philosophical), but we weren’t there to evangelize. We were there to listen and to get to know our participants.

Not only did we achieve that goal, it turned out that participation in office hours led to participation in the overall process. We had the data to prove this. But even if we didn’t, we still would have continued doing this or something similar. Relationships matter, and this was one of the best ways we had for developing them.

Third, we tried our best to get to know people as whole human beings. My colleagues, Renee Fazzari and Curtis Ogden, both like to say that we’re not just brains on sticks. Unfortunately, it’s amazing how often we treat each other that way, even in a face-to-face context. It’s even easier to make this mistake online when you can’t actually see the person.

Early in our process, we had one participant who was causing a lot of trouble over an obscure decision that we had made and with which everyone else had agreed. It had to do with whether or not Brazilian Portugese is a different language from Portugese. The issue is more complex than it sounds, and we chose to go in a different direction than other Wikimedia communities, which was within our rights but also required explanation. Our reasoning satisfied everybody except for this one participant, who was making it difficult for us to move forward.

We tried engaging with him in a number of different ways, but nothing worked, and I decided at some point that we just had to do our best to ignore him. As it so happened, Philippe, our facilitator, was going to Brazil to meet with community members there, and I asked him to look out for this one participant just in case.

While Philippe was in Brazil, the participant’s demeanor abruptly changed, and he became one of our most constructive contributors. I asked Philippe what happened. “I just talked to him for a bit,” Philippe said. “He was really great — whip smart and very nice. Oh, by the way, he’s 14.”

I got a good laugh out of that. I had envisioned him as a large, cantankerous man in his 50s, and I was probably communicating with him as such. Knowing his age wouldn’t have changed my respect for him, but it would have helped me engage with him more productively.

Everybody is people.

Earlier this year, I was helping a practitioner at a large company design a high-stakes offsite for the leaders of one of its divisions. They had been having intense friction, and they were hoping to work through it at this offsite. This practitioner’s instinct was to schedule a 30-minute working lunch, because… well, that’s what they always did, and they had a lot to cover.

I pushed back. I generally treat lunch and breaks at my meetings as sacred time — time to break bread, to reconnect with each other, to rest and reset. I doubted that the extra 30-minutes would result in substantial progress, but I was certain that not taking a break would detract from the rest of the day’s conversations.

To this practitioner’s credit, she not only embraced my feedback, she made some surprising suggestions. Instead of giving them an hour for lunch, why not give them 90 minutes? And instead of hosting a lunch, why not encourage them to go into the city and eat out together? All of these leaders were used to eating at their desks or in meetings during lunch. Going out would feel different.

We went with her idea, and we had our meeting. I facilitated the conversation using my mindset cards, and I felt like I was on top of my game. It was as intense as we expected, but it went well overall. At the end of the day and in our evaluations, our participants had many good things to say, including appreciations here and there about the mindset cards and about my facilitation.

However, the one thing everyone kept mentioning over and over again was the lunch. Everybody loved how spacious it was, the conversations they got to have with their peers that they never had otherwise. Everybody loved getting out of the meeting room and spending time in the city together. It led into a surprisingly deep conversation about why they didn’t always do this and how they might start.

Six weeks later, I checked in with the practitioner to see how things were going. The team was still having issues, but there were signs of progress here and there. The biggest takeaway from our meeting that had stuck? It wasn’t the mindset work that I had so expertly facilitated. It was the long, luxurious, so-unproductive-it-was-productive lunch. People were going out to lunch together more often. People were scheduling more lunches with their teams and protecting lunches in their meetings.

Everybody is people.

I’ve been helping groups collaborate more effectively for 16 years now. Many of these projects have been extremely complex, which has helped me develop lots of sophisticated skills. I’m proud of these abilities, I have no doubt that they make me a much more effective practitioner, and I work hard to continue to develop them.

But in reflecting on my work over the years, the skill that has undoubtedly had the most impact has been remembering that everybody is people. It’s simultaneously obvious and extraordinary and humbling to realize this. We all understand this at some level, because… well, everybody is people. However, we often forget to incorporate this into our work. We are dazzled by stories of perseverance through difficult circumstances, our ability to “suck it up” or “tough it out,” and rather than optimize our work to help us all be at our best, we create circumstances that require us to be superhuman to succeed and that punish us when we’re not.

This is lunacy. Sadly, it’s all too common.

I don’t think it has to be this way. I think all of us have the power to make changes that will impact our groups in positive, sometimes profound ways, if we just remembered that everybody is people. It starts by looking at ourselves, by asking what we need — as people — to help us be at our best. Maybe there’s something simple that we can do that doesn’t depend on anyone else, whether it’s remembering to eat breakfast or to welcome someone else on your team. It doesn’t have to be hard, but it will make a big difference.

After all, everybody is people.

Thanks to Amy Wu for reviewing an early draft of this post.

Do-It-Yourself Strategy and Culture

In 2009, I was asked by the Wikimedia Foundation to design and lead a movement-wide strategic planning process. The goal was to create a high-quality, five-year strategic plan the same way that Wikipedia was created — by creating a space where anyone in the world who cared could come and literally co-author the plan.

We had two fundamental challenges. First, it wasn’t enough to simply have a plan. It had to be a good plan that some significant percentage of the movement both understood and felt ownership over.

Second, we were asking people in the community to develop a strategy, but most people had no idea what strategy was. (This, frankly, is true of people in general, even in business.) It was different from Wikipedia in that most people already have a mental model of what an encyclopedia is. We had to be more concrete about what it was that we were asking people to do.

I explained that strategic planning, when done well, consists of collectively exploring four basic questions:

Where are we now?
Where do we want to go? Why?
How do we get there?

I further explained that we were going to create a website with these questions, we were going to get as many people as possible to explore these questions on that website, and by the end of the year, we would have our movement-wide, five-year strategic plan.

And that’s essentially what we did.

Get the right people to explore core questions together. Where are we now? Where do we want to go, and why? How do we get there? Provide the space and the support to help these people have the most effective conversation possible. Trust that something good will emerge and that those who created it will feel ownership over it.

This is how I’ve always done strategy, regardless of the size or shape of the group. It looks different every time, but the basic principles are always the same. People were intrigued by what we accomplished with Wikimedia, because it was global and primarily online, because we had gaudy results, and because Wikipedia is a sexy project. However, I was simply using the same basic approach that I use when working with small teams and even my own life.

The craft of developing strategy is figuring out how best to explore these core questions. It’s not hard to come up with answers. The challenge is coming up with good answers. To do that, you need to give the right people the opportunity and the space to struggle over these questions. That process doesn’t just result in better answers. It results in greater ownership over those answers.

Breakfast and Culture

What’s your strategy for eating breakfast in the morning?

Are you a grab-and-run person, either from your own kitchen or from a coffee shop near your office? Eating breakfast at home is cheaper than eating out, but eating out might be faster. Are you optimizing for time or money? Why?

Maybe you have kids, and you value the ritual of kicking off the day eating together? Maybe you’re a night owl, and you’d rather get an extra 30-minutes of sleep than worry about eating at all in the morning.

Where do you want to go? Why? How do you get there? These are key strategic questions, but you can’t answer them without also considering culture — your patterns of behavior, your values, your mindsets, your identity. Choosing to cook your own meals is as much a cultural decision as it is a strategic one.

In my past life as a collaboration consultant, groups would hire me to help with either strategy or culture, but never both. I realized fairly quickly that trying to separate those two processes was largely artificial, that you couldn’t explore one without inevitably colliding with the other.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He did not intend to say that one was more important than the other, but that both were necessarily intertwined. Or, as my friend, Jeff Hwang, has more accurately put it, “Saying culture eats strategy for breakfast is like saying your left foot eats your right foot for breakfast. You need both.”

As with strategy, culture work is a process of collective inquiry, except instead of focusing on action (where do you want to go?), the questions are centered around identity:

Who are we now?
Who do we want to be, and why?
How do we get there?

The key to effective culture work is to explore these questions yourself, to struggle over them together as a group, and to constantly revisit them as you try things and learn.

DIY Strategy and Culture

Toward the end of 2013, Dharmishta Rood, who was then managing Code for America’s startups program, asked me if I would mentor one of its incubator companies, which was having some challenges around communication and decision-making. I had been toying with some ideas for a do-it-yourself toolkit that would help groups develop better collaborative habits on their own, and I suggested that we start there.

We immediately ran into problems. The toolkit assumed that the group was already aligned around a core strategy, but with this group, that wasn’t the case. They had been going, going, going without stopping to step back and ask themselves what they were trying to accomplish, how they wanted to accomplish those things, and why. (This is very typical with startups.)

This group needed space to do some core work around strategy and culture. I threw out my old toolkit and created a new one designed to help groups have strategy and culture conversations continuously and productively on their own. The revised toolkit was based on the key questions underlying strategy and culture depicted as two cyclical loops:

While most strategy or culture processes are progressively staged, in practice, inquiry is never linear, nor should it be. Spending time on one question surfaces new insights into the other questions, and vice-versa. Where you start and the order in which you go are not important. What matters is that you get to all of the questions eventually and that you revisit them constantly — hence the two cycles. My colleague, Kate Wing, recently noted the resemblance of the diagram to bicycle wheels, which is why we now call it the Strategy-Culture Bicycle.

Dharmishta and I saw the Bicycle pay immediate dividends with this group. People were able to wade through the complexity and overwhelm, notice and celebrate what they had already accomplished, and identify high-priority questions that needed further discussion. Furthermore, the process was simple enough that it did not require a third-party’s assistance. They were able to do it fine on their own, and they would get better at it as they practiced.

Pleased and a bit surprised by its effectiveness, I asked my long-time colleague, Amy Wu of Duende, to partner with me on these toolkits. We prototyped another version of the toolkit with four of last year’s Code for America accelerator companies, and once again, saw great success.

We’ve gone through eight iterations together, we’ve tested the kit with over a dozen groups and individuals (for personal and professional life planning), and we’ve added some complementary components. A number of practitioners have used the toolkit on their own to help other groups, including me, Dharmishta, Amy, Kate, and Rebecca Petzel.

I’m thrilled by the potential of toolkits like these to help build the capacity of practitioners to act more strategically and to design their aspired culture. As with all of my work, these toolkits are available here and are public domain, meaning that they are freely available and that you can do anything you want with them. You can also purchase pre-printed packages.

Please use them, share them, and share your experiences! Your feedback will help us continuously improve them.

The Art of the Start

Two of my mentors, Gail and Matt Taylor, often stress the importance of “clean beginnings.” Whenever you take on any hard, collaborative project, you have to expect that it will get messy in the middle. If you take the time to set up conditions for success at the beginning of the project, you will greatly increase your chances of surviving — even thriving in — that mess. Folks in this business often refer to this as “creating a safe container.”

I’m in the process of doing this with two projects right now — an experiment with the Code for America Incubator Program and the kickoff of Garfield Foundation’s latest Collaborative Networks initiative — and I wanted to share some of my experiences in “the art of the start” from these and other projects.

Creating a safe container consists of three activities:

Literally creating a delightful, inviting space (physical, virtual, or both) in which the group can interact
Developing shared understanding among the group
Making explicit working agreements.

When done effectively, these three things in combination lead to greater trust within the group, which enables it to work effectively moving forward.

1. Create Delightful, Inviting Space

The physical spaces in which we work have a huge impact on our ability to work effectively. Dark, tight spaces affect the mood of the group. The seating arrangement can physically reinforce certain power dynamics. If it’s hard to get to the whiteboard, people won’t use it.

These issues don’t just apply to physical space. If your group has a weekly two-hour phone call with poor audio quality and no shared display, people will dread (or simply tune out) those calls. If you’ve chosen to interact using an online tool that nobody knows how to use, then no one will use it.

Spatial issues may seem trivial, but I think they are just as important as facilitation. In 2012, I co-led a project called the Delta Dialogues, where we were facilitating a multistakeholder group around California water issues. Our participants had been fighting over these extremely contentious issues for decades, and many had standing lawsuits with each other.

One of the early decisions we made was to rotate our meeting locations among the participants rather than seek “neutral” space. We had six one-day meetings scheduled, and we decided to devote half that time to “learning journeys” — essentially tours of each others’ spaces. We did this because the Sacramento Delta is beautiful, and we wanted to spend as much time as possible in that beauty to remind ourselves what this was all about. We also did this wanted participants to experience each other’s environments first-hand to build greater empathy.

This was not a decision we made lightly. Given the complexity of the issues we were discussing, devoting half of our times to field trips felt hard to swallow, and we went back and forth on this decision a number of times. However, when the process was over, participants consistently cited these learning journeys as the most powerful part of the process for them.

Rick Reed, the leader of the Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative, feels as strongly about the importance of the physical experience as I do. He seeks out great meeting space with beautiful light, and he makes sure that the food is excellent and memorable. Some people do not think foundations should be spending money on things like great space and food in light of the economic hardships the nonprofit sector is currently facing. While I am a fan of fiscal discipline, if foundations want to contribute to great collaborative experiences, I think investing in great space and great food are two of the easiest and most impactful ways to do that.

Creating an inviting, delightful space is not just about physical or even virtual space. Language, for example, is a big part of this. I often use the term “ground rules” to describe working agreements (see below), but when I used the term at a Collaborative Networks design meeting, our teammate, Ruth Rominger, pushed back. She thought the implications of “rules” ran counter to the culture we were trying to build. On Curtis Ogden’s suggestion, we decided to adopt the term “working agreements” instead, which is more inviting, but still meaningful.

2. Develop Shared Understanding

The group norming process is about developing shared understanding, which leads to greater trust and stronger relationships. The default way to build shared understanding is to work together. There are great merits to this, but they are easily neutralized or worse if you don’t take the time to have explicit conversations about norms as well.

For example, when I worked as a consultant, I spent a significant amount of time helping stakeholders get aligned and clear around the goals of the project. It was a straightforward, but time-consuming step, one that most groups would skip if left to their own devices. And yet that step alone made a huge difference in the quality of the engagement once we got going. Often, individuals do not feel empowered or accountable to the rest of the group, simply because there is no shared understanding of what they’re supposed to be doing or what’s expected of them.

How do you develop this shared understanding? The simplest first step is to carve out time to have those conversations as a group. A huge part of my experiment with the Code for America Incubator is simply that — giving startups structured time to have explicit conversations about things such as what kind of organization they’d like to be and how they’d like to work together.

Beyond this, there are a few useful tricks. One is to tap into people’s personal experiences and values. Rather than start with the question, “How would you like to work together?”, ask each other, “What’s been your best experience working together?”, or better yet, “Why did you get into this work?” Have people share those stories with each other, then pull out key patterns and insights from the stories.

With the Delta Dialogues, we had participants answer the question, “What’s your favorite place in the Delta?” Many of the participants had known each other for decades, yet did not know each other’s answers to these questions. It reinforced the fact that everybody in the room (including the supposed “bad guys”) had deep connections to the Delta, and it reminded everybody about what was at stake.

Another trick is to design these experiences to be in-the-flow as much as possible. People who design collaborative engagements — consultants in particular — often make two mistakes: They focus too much on meetings, and they don’t pay enough attention to the work that participants are already doing. You’re almost never starting from scratch. People have pre-existing relationships, and they may already have done the work that you’re wanting to do.

I joined the Wikimedia strategic planning process in 2009. The Wikimedia Foundation had hired a traditional management consultancy four months earlier, and they were stuck. These consultants had no experience with participatory processes or with the Wikimedia community, and they had designed a process that was not viable. Their plan looked like most traditional strategic planning processes. They would spend four months doing research on their own and coming up with the “right” strategic questions, then they would unleash a polished presentation to the community at large and ask for feedback.

Not only did this approach not account for the spirit of the project (wiki-style strategic planning) or the culture of the community, it completely ignored the challenge of enrollment. The Wikimedia editing community consisted largely of men in their teens and twenties. They had no concept of what strategic planning was, much less why they should engage in it. Even if they did understand what strategic planning was, they had no reason to engage with us about it. Why should they trust our claimed intentions to facilitate an open, wiki-style process?

I wanted to develop a shared understanding of the work that had already been done, and I also wanted to develop a shared understanding around what we were trying to do with this process. Rather than wait four months to do research in isolation, within a week of starting the project, we were engaging with the community on a wiki. We explained what we hoped to do, and we listened. We didn’t make grand promises, and we didn’t claim any expertise. We basically invited people to tell everybody (not just us) what they thought the Wikimedia movement’s priorities should be and to point to work that was already happening.

In the spirit of creating an inviting container, our facilitator, Philippe Beaudette, stressed the importance of making our space multilingual, given how international the community was. We invited people to engage in any language with which they felt comfortable, and we did our best to translate our requests into as many languages as possible.

We had a clear ask, and that ask felt very familiar to the Wikimedia community. They were used to sharing and organizing their thoughts, and they were not shy about expressing their opinions. Within a few weeks, we had an incredible compendium of well-organized thinking that had already been done by the community, along with a set of thoughtful, strategic questions that people felt were important to explore.

More importantly, people started trusting us. They saw that we got it, that we weren’t going to try to impose something top down on a movement that was inherently bottoms-up. (We would have failed if we tried.) We didn’t try to have some grand kickoff meeting or to facilitate a bunch of private, insider conversations. Instead, we spent time in the spaces that already existed (such as the wiki and in real-time online chat channels), and we facilitated a many-to-many conversation, not just a one-on-one conversation. The community was taking ownership of the process, and we were contributing to it. Even if they didn’t fully understand what we were trying to do, they understood it well enough and they trusted us enough to give it a chance.

3. Make Explicit Working Agreements

I find making explicit agreements on how you’d like to work together to be one of the most valuable things a group can do, whether it’s a small team or a large network.

For example, some might think that “treating other people with respect” should be implicit in every working arrangement. Even if that’s the case, making it explicit can’t hurt, and it can even help. For one, it forces you to develop some shared understanding around what “treating other people with respect” actually means. To some, it might mean never raising your voice. To others, it might have nothing to do with how you express yourself, only that you do. Getting these things out into the open earlier rather than later, then coming to agreement on them will prevent trouble later on.

Establishing working agreements has two other important effects, especially with larger groups. First, it makes everyone accountable for holding him- or herself and each other to these agreements. Often, in large meetings, people depend on a facilitator to keep the conversation constructive and civil. That indeed is one of the facilitator’s responsibilities, but it’s a muscle that everyone in the group should be exercising. In healthy groups, everybody will help each other abide by these agreements.

Second, they set agreed-upon conditions for kicking people out of a group. A lot of people fear open processes, because they’re worried that others will hijack the conversation, and they mistakenly assume that you can’t kick people out of an open conversation. If you create clear working agreements up-front, and if you make sure people are aware of those agreements, then when people unapologetically cross the line, you have the right to expel them.

We had over a thousand people participate in the Wikimedia strategic planning process. Over the course of the year-long process, we kicked out two people from the process as a whole, and I kicked out one person from one meeting (who apologized afterward, and went on to be a very constructive participant in the process). None of those incidents were easy, but when we made those moves, everyone in the community understood and agreed with our actions, because of our previously established working agreements.

This blog post is also available in French. Many thanks to Lilian Ricaud for the translation!