What I’ve Learned About Building Collaboration Muscles

It’s now been seven years since I first started exploring a simple hypothesis:

  • Collaboration is a muscle (or, rather, a set of muscles)
  • You strengthen these muscles by exercising them repeatedly (i.e. practice)

Our current orientation toward collaboration is knowledge-centric, not practice-centric. No one expects anyone to get good at playing the guitar by handing them a book or sending them to a week-long “training,” yet somehow, this is exactly how we try to help folks get better at communicating or navigating hairy group dynamics.

I’ve spent the past seven years trying to change this. I’m currently on the fifth iteration of my experiments, which I’m currently calling Collaboration Gym. The other iterations (slightly out of order) were:

  1. Changemaker Bootcamp (2013)
  2. Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets (2014-2015)
  3. Habits of High-Performing Groups (2018-present)
  4. “Personal” Training for Organizations (2016-present)
  5. Collaboration Gym (2020-present)

I’ve failed a lot and learned a ton with each iteration, and I thought it would be fun to summarize what I’ve been learning here. I’ve also been having provocative conversations with Sarna Salzman and Freya Bradford about what a Collaboration Gym (or, in their case, a “Systems Change Dojo”) might look like in their community of Traverse City, Michigan. We’ve stayed mostly big picture so far, but recently decided that it was time to get real and specific. With their permission, I’ve decided to do my thinking out loud so as to force me to write down these scattered thoughts and also get some early feedback from a broader set of folks. That means you, dear reader! Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Changemaker Bootcamp (2013)

The first iteration of this experiment was Changemaker Bootcamp, a face-to-face workout program that met for two hours every week for six weeks. I designed a series of exercises focused on developing muscles I considered to be critical for effective collaboration, such as listening actively, asking generative questions, navigating power, and having challenging conversations.

My participants — all of whom enrolled individually — generally found the exercises valuable and appreciated the practice-orientation. They also got along well with each other and valued the peer feedback. I designed the workouts to feel like physical workouts, only without the sweating and exhaustion. They consisted of warmups followed by intense exercises, with “just enough” explanations for why we were doing what we were doing. Most found the experiential emphasis refreshing. A few found it slightly dissatisfying. Even though they trusted me, they still wanted me to explain the why of each workout in greater detail.

These initial pilots helped me test and refine my initial set of workouts, and they also helped build my confidence. However, there were three key flaws.

  1. We weren’t repeating any of the exercises. In order to do this, I needed more of my participants’ time and I needed to focus my workouts on just a few core muscles.
  2. I needed an assessment. This would help me figure out the muscles on which to focus, and it would also help participants sense their progress.
  3. I was having trouble explaining the specific value and impact of this kind of training to people who didn’t already know and trust me.

Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets (2014-2015)

I tried to address these flaws in my next iteration, Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets. I almost tripled the length of the program from six to 16 weeks to create more space for repetition and habit-building. I created an assessment that folks would take at the beginning and at the end of the program, which helped me focus the workouts and also enabled the group to track their progress. Finally, I made it a cohort training rather than a program for individuals, which also helped with focus.

I also shifted the trainings from face-to-face to a remote, decentralized model, where I paired people up and made them responsible for scheduling their workouts on their own. After each workout, folks would share one takeaway on an online forum. This created group accountability by signaling that they were doing the workouts, but it itself was also a workout focused on muscles for sharing early and often. Every four weeks, everyone would get together for a full group workout.

Not being face-to-face meant I couldn’t (easily) do somatic workouts and that the instructions had to be clear and compelling. Not leading the pair workouts meant that I couldn’t make real-time adjustments. These constraints forced me to be more rigorous in designing and testing my workouts. In return, doing them remotely made it easier to participate and shifted agency away from me to the participants, which was in line with my desire to de-guru-fy this work.

I consistently faced early resistance from folks about the time commitment. I tried to explain that the workouts were in the context of the work that they were already doing, so they weren’t actually doing anything “extra,” but reception to this was mixed. Even though people got the metaphor around practice and working out, they didn’t have their own felt experiences around what this might look like, which made my description of the program feel abstract.

In the end, I asked participants to trust me, explaining that they would be believers after a few weeks. Most folks are hungry to talk about their work with someone who will empathize, be supportive, and offer feedback. Talking with the same person regularly enables people to get to the point faster, because their partners already know the context. Even if folks ignored my instructions entirely and just talked, I knew that they would get value out of simply having regular conversations with other good people.

This almost always turned out to be true. After the first week of workouts, folks would generally report having an excellent conversation with their partner. After about six weeks, people would often start saying that their workouts with their partners were the highlights of their week. Even though people generally had a felt sense of progress by the end of the program, they especially loved the final assessment, because they could point to and talk about the progress they had made in a concrete way.

Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets was a vast improvement over Changemaker Bootcamp, but people were still not practicing enough to see the kinds of dramatic, persistent improvement I wanted to see. I needed to focus the workouts even more and find ways to get people more repetitions.

I was also still having trouble explaining how doing these workouts would lead to the promised impacts. People understood the theory, but without felt experience, it felt too abstract. If you think about it, telling folks who are out-of-shape that they could be running a 5K in two months simply by running a little bit every day also feels abstract and far-fetched. The reason people are willing to believe this, even without felt experience, is that they know that many others have done it successfully. I probably need to get to the same place before folks truly believe the story I’m telling about collaboration muscles and practice.

Habits of High-Performing Groups (2018-present)

In 2018, I decided to shift the frame of my trainings to focus on four habits of high-performing groups:

Throughout the course of my work with groups of all shapes and sizes, I noticed that the best-performing groups do all four of these things consistently and well. These also serve as keystone habits, meaning that doing them regularly often unlocks and unleashes other important muscles and habits. Regularly trying to align around anything, for example, forces you to get better at listening, synthesizing, and working more iteratively. Only having four habits made focusing my workouts much easier.

My monthly Good Goal-Setting Peer Coaching Workshops was an attempt to help people strengthen their muscles around the first habit — aligning around success. Participants were asked to fill out a Success Spectrum before the workshop, then they got two rounds of feedback from their peers and optional feedback from me afterward. People could register for individual workshops, or they could pay for a yearly subscription that enabled them to drop into any workshop. The subscription was priced low to incentivize regular attendance.

Almost 30 percent of registrants opted for the subscription, which was wonderful. However, only 40 percent of subscribers participated in more than one workshop, even though their evaluations were positive, which meant that the majority of subscribers were essentially paying a higher fee for a single workshop. One subscriber didn’t show up to any of the trainings, which made my gym analogy even more apt.

Another subscriber attended four trainings, and watching her growth reaffirmed the value of this muscle-building approach. However, not being able to get more folks to attend more regularly — even though they had already paid for it — was a bummer.

I think I could leverage some behavioral psychology to encourage more repeat participation. One trick I’m keen to try is to have people pay a subscription fee, then give them money back every time they attend a workout. I also think cohort models, like Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets, are better at incentivizing more regular attendance.

The most negative feedback I got from these trainings was that some participants wanted more coaching from me as opposed to their peers. I designed these trainings around peer coaching as part of my ongoing effort to de-guru-fy this work. Just like working out with a buddy can be just as effective for getting into shape as working out with a personal fitness instructor, I wanted people to understand that making time to practice with anyone helps develop collaboration muscles. Still, I think there’s an opportunity to strike a better balance between peer feedback and feedback from me.

In this vein, this past year, I started offering Coaching for Collaboration Practitioners as a way to help leaders and groups develop the four habits of high-performing groups. This has been my most effective muscle-building approach to date, which makes me somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, I’m glad that acting as a personal trainer is effective at getting people to work out. On the other hand, not everyone can afford a personal trainer. We need more gym-like practice spaces if we’re going to help folks at scale.

“Personal” Training for Organizations (2016-present)

Finally, over the past five years, I’ve been experimenting with customized organizational workouts focused on specific needs, such as strategy and equity.

I’ve found decent success at convincing potential clients to let me take a muscle-building approach toward their work. For example, rather than help a client develop a strategy, I will lead a client through a series of workouts designed to strengthen their muscles for acting strategically. Still, I often have to strike a tricky balance between more traditional consulting and this workout approach.

I’ve gotten much better at striking this balance over the years. In the early days, I tried partnering with other consultants to handle the more traditional work so that I could focus on the training. That almost always failed, especially with more established partners, because they didn’t fully get and believe in my approach, and in the struggle to find the right balance, the workouts would usually fall by the wayside.

Working by myself allowed me to be more disciplined in my approach, but I still struggled to maintain the right balance, and I failed a lot. I feel like I’ve only begun to turn the corner in the past few months. One thing that’s helped is getting much clearer about what clients need to already have in place in order for the muscle-building approach to succeed, specifically:

  • Alignment around the what, why, and how
  • Structures, mindsets, and muscles to support their work

For example, attempting to help a group develop muscles when they don’t have the right structures in place can cause more harm than good. To help demonstrate what happens when you’re missing one of these critical ingredients, I created a model inspired by the Lippitt-Knoster Model, to which Kate Wing introduced me:

Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Performance
Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Confusion

“Why are we doing this?!”

Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Frustration

“We can’t succeed in these conditions.”

Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles =

Resistance

“I don’t want to be doing this.”

Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles =

Anxiety

“We’re not capable of doing this.”

Collaboration Gym and Future Iterations

I’m mostly resigned to more “personal training” work, if only to accumulate more Couch-to-5K-style success stories, so that people can develop more faith in the muscle-building approach. (If you or your organization would like to hire me for coaching or to design a custom workout program, drop me an email.) But I continue to be committed to experimenting with more scaleable and affordable approaches to muscle-building than hiring personal trainers. I’m hoping to unveil the Collaboration Gym early next year, and I’ve already successfully piloted a number of new workouts that will be part of it.

Epic success for me is to see others participate in similar experiments on their own and to share what they learn. A Collaboration Gym is only useful if there are lots of gyms all over the place. I give away all of my intellectual property so that others can copy and build on it, and I will continue to share my learnings here to further encourage replication.

Design Sketch for a Network of Collaboration Practitioners

Earlier this year, I announced that I wanted to build a more formal network of collaboration practitioners. I wrote:

It’s always been an important part of my strategy, and it feels like the right moment to prioritize it.

I also want to be open and transparent about how I’m trying to do it in order to model network principles. As the field has professionalized, I’ve felt a narrowness in how many practitioners interpret and practice network principles. I want to offer a counter to this.

In subsequent blog posts, I shared what I had learned from previous experiences. In my first case study, I pulled out the following principles:

  • Be clear about what you want
  • Avoid premature and unnecessary structure
  • Assume abundance!

In my second case study, I pulled out a few more principles:

  • Be selfish, but in a networked way
  • Frequent collisions
  • Networks are about relationships

In this post, I want to offer a few more driving principles and outline how I’m currently thinking about pulling this all together.

Inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous

In addition to my previous work, one of my biggest inspirations for how I want to design this is Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.). A.A. is a global, open, decentralized, self-organizing network that emphasizes pair relationships and peer support, and it has helped thousands of people over the years, including a few whom I know. The core of its program is its 12 steps, the first step of which is admitting you have a problem. Anyone can start an A.A. support group. It simply requires “the need for one as expressed by at least two or three alcoholics; the cooperation of other A.A. members; a meeting place; a coffeepot; A.A. literature and meeting lists; and other supplies.”

I love how open, clear, and simple the platform is. There are formal structures to help keep this all organized, but the basic model is to encourage motivated people to take action. Furthermore, there is a deeply embedded culture of support and practice. This is not dictated by the structure, but it’s reinforced by it. The structures themselves are simple, even though the work of living with addiction is not.

I’ve always been taken by A.A.’s model and results. I also think that what many collaboration practitioners (including me) need amounts to self-help. Most of us are not working in structures that are conducive to our work. Many of us are not doing this work as part of our official roles within our groups, which means it often comes on our own time, and the work is often unseen and undervalued. When structure and culture is working against you, it’s even more contingent for you to maintain disciplined habits and to find support where you can.

I think a lot of collaboration practitioners already find ways to do this on our own, especially the peer support part. However, I think our default culture prevents us from truly getting what we want. I think we generally don’t ask for as much time as we need (and that others would happily provide, because it would benefit them too), and I think we’re generally not as open or transparent about what we’re learning as we could be.

What I Want

I want to create a support group for collaboration practitioners focused on developing and maintaining good habits, the kinds of habits that will not only make us better practitioners, but also enable us to live happy, healthy, sane lives. (These two things are inextricably intertwingled in my opinion.)

I want us to be focused on depth over breadth — deep practice, deep sharing, deep relationships. I want all of us to have a sense of what’s going on with each other professionally and personally. I want there to be enough trust and shared understanding and language that we all feel comfortable throwing around crazy ideas or asking for help. I would love to see participants collaborate, but only when it’s compelling. I’m not interested in collaboration for collaboration’s sake.

I want it to be an open group, but I also want it to feel intimate. I assume this means that it needs to be small, which may require limiting the size of the group, but I don’t know what the limit should be or whether this assumption is even true. I want participants to share what they learn from each other more broadly while also being thoughtful and respectful of people’s privacy and safety.

In other words, I don’t just want this to be a group of folks we already know and are comfortable with. I want to see diversity in as many dimensions as possible — age, gender, race, job, etc. This suggests paying particular attention to diversity and mobility (people moving in and out) with the initial group and letting it evolve from there.

I want participants to feel ownership and agency over their experience in the group. I want it to be leaderful and bold.

Finally, I want to create structures and practices that are easily replicable and customizable, I want to invest in the culture and capacities that can lead to success, and I want to share everything that I learn in the process. I’d love to see many, many, many groups copy what we do, customizing it as they see fit, and openly and frequently sharing what they learn so that we all may benefit. These groups could share a common “brand” or identity, like A.A., but it’s not that important to me. What matters more is that these types of spaces for collaboration practitioners to support each other are abundant.

Design Sketch

Given all of the above, here’s what I’m thinking (and have already started to experiment with). The group (as yet unnamed) would be centered around supporting each other with these Habits of Effective Collaboration Practitioners:

  1. Admit you are a collaboration practitioner.
  2. Breathe.
  3. Start with you.
  4. Listen and understand others.
  5. Be intentional, and hold it lightly.
  6. Stretch, but don't hurt yourself.
  7. Be compassionate.
  8. Do the work.
  9. Pick yourself up.
  10. Celebrate!
  11. Reflect and integrate.
  12. Share!
  13. Repeat.

Most practitioners already do some subset of these regularly. Our goal would be to support each other in doing all of them, which would help all of us become better practitioners and people. (I’ll blog more about this list later, as I’m still eliciting feedback and making changes. I’d love to hear your reactions in the comments section below. Many thanks to Anya Kandel, Travis Kriplean, Eun-Joung Lee, Danny Spitzberg, Matt Thompson, and Kate Wing for providing early feedback.)

Everyone participating would go through an on-boarding process that would include reviewing these habits and talking one-on-one with at least two current participants. This would help people feel more welcome, and it would remind everyone that networks are fundamentally about people and relationships and that we encourage people to forge their own individual connections beyond the platform.

Beyond the on-boarding, there would be only one required activity (which would take place on a Slack instance set up for this group) — checking in every week. The checkin could be brief, and the prompt could change over time, but the basic idea is that everyone would share what was going on in their work and lives at least once a week.

This simple practice would accomplish several things:

  • Make it clear whether you’re in or out. (More on this below.)
  • Help people learn how to use and get comfortable with the platform
  • Build community and relationships through frequent, but lightweight engagement
  • Establish a rhythm that makes the community and the space feel alive
  • Support participants in developing core collaboration and network muscles, especially our Sharing muscles.

I want to make it both simple and clear to delineate between those participating in this network and those who are not. If you’re willing to go through the on-boarding, agree to some basic community agreements, and check in regularly, you’re welcome to participate. I also want to make it okay not to participate. This structure may not feel right for some, or it may not be the right group of people, or it may be asking for too much time. Just because you’re not participating in this particular network doesn’t mean you can’t (or don’t) have a relationship with me or other participants. If you stop participating for whatever reason, that’s okay too, and you’d be welcome to return by just going through the on-boarding again.

I’m also making a bet about our Sharing muscles. When it comes to sharing, most of the practitioners I’ve met default to sharing only when they’re face-to-face with others and in larger, more "finished" chunks. There’s nothing wrong with this. However, many of the interesting and desirable things that sometimes emerge from networks require more frequent and open sharing. Rather than hoping this happens organically, I want to actively cultivate this muscle by encouraging participants to share rough little tidbits about their work and their thinking more frequently. My hope is that developing this one keystone habit will help unlock all sorts of other desirable muscles and mindsets — pausing, working iteratively, comfort sharing rough work, vulnerability, celebration, etc. — which will both help all of us individually as practitioners and the network as a whole.

Finally, I want to encourage (but not require) participants to find a regular checkin partner, similar to my experiences with Kate Wing over the past five years.

I’ve been experimenting with some of these ideas and structures over the past year, and I’m looking forward to taking another step forward. (Many thanks to Cherine Badawi, Shirley Huey, Anya Kandel, Travis Kriplean, Adene Sacks, and Zoe Tamaki for playing.) I have lots of open questions, and I’m looking forward to exploring these.

I’m not ready to open it up to everyone just yet. I want to be really intentional about establishing the culture and practices with a core group, and I want to make sure that we have a good balance of emerging and experienced practitioners. That said, if you think you might want to play, please either leave a comment below or send me an email directly. If you want to try to start your own group stealing any or all of this, please do, and please let me know, as I’d love to learn from your experiences! Finally, if you have any other thoughts on any of this, please leave a comment below. This is a work-in-progress, and I’m looking forward to continuing to share what I learn.

This is the last in a series of blog posts about building a network of collaboration practitioners. The others are:

  1. Building a Network of Collaboration Practitioners (February 7, 2019)
  2. A Personal Case Study in Network-Building: Pre-IPO (February 20, 2019)
  3. A Personal Case Study in Network-Building: Selfishness, Frequent Collisions, and my Colearning Experiment (May 7, 2019)
  4. What We Learned from Five Years of Check-ins (May 14, 2019)