high-performance groups – Page 2

The “Secret” to High-Performance Collaboration Is Practice

On March 22, 2017, I had the pleasure of giving the keynote at The Collaboratory 5, a forum of about 200 Jewish innovators and entrepreneurs focused on grassroots change. My talk was on my favorite topic and the driving force behind my work for the past four years: how practice can lead to better collaboration.

Afterward, I led the whole group through the one-minute drill, followed by two breakout sessions where I led smaller groups through a power workout (including power video analysis and playing with status). My goal was not only to tell people how important practice was, but to lead them through an experience where they could get a sense of what I meant by practice and its value, especially if repeated over and over again.

I had an incredible time. It reminded me how different this mindset around practice is and how much I enjoy talking about and doing this stuff with new audiences. I’m looking forward to giving more talks and workouts in the near future. (If you’d like me to do this with your group, drop me an email.) Many thanks to my friend and colleague, Adene Sacks, for referring me and to Lisa Lepson, Jenny Kibrit Smith, and all of the organizers for inviting me and for being great hosts! Thanks to Duane Stork for the photo above.

Here’s a video of my talk!

Edited Transcript

Here are my slides and a tightly edited transcript.

What’s the best collaborative experience you’ve ever had? It could be personal or professional, with one other person or a large group, etc.

How many of you were able to come up with an example?

How many of you came up with one easily?

The story I want to share today has nothing to do with my work and didn’t even involve me. I have a friend who used to teach violin. She would start her beginning students by teaching them variations of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The first time I saw her teach, she was teaching this very serious five-year old. Toward the end of the lesson, after numerous repetitions, my friend — who was playing alongside her student — decided to harmonize the last few bars. When she heard the harmony, the little girl’s face just absolutely lit up.

I’m lucky to have been a part of and to have seen and studied many great collaborative experiences. But that time I watched that little girl’s face light up upon experiencing that simple little harmony that she herself was a part of stands out in my mind. I get chills thinking about that moment, because hearing that simple little harmony lit me up too.

When I ask folks about their best experiences collaborating, most people have a hard time coming up with an example. But, whether you can easily recall an experience or not, I think everyone has had a moment like that little girl had with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We all have an intuition about what great collaboration should feel like, even if we have low expectations about getting to experience it.

What would your world be like if all of your experiences collaborating were at least as good as your best?

What would the world be like if everybody’s experiences collaborating were at least as good as their best? Imagine this world for a moment, and soak in the feeling.

Practice

My mission for the past 15 years has been to create a world where everyone’s baseline experience with collaboration feels exactly like that little girl did when my friend started harmonizing with her.

How do you do this? How do you help improve everybody’s collaborative experiences?

Said another way, what’s the secret to high-performance collaboration, and how do you scale this?

About five years ago, I realized that most of my successes in helping others collaborate more effectively were hollow. We would do good work together side-by-side, we would achieve good outcomes, and people would have a good experience getting there. But when I left, most groups would fall back on old habits. I was like a ringer in basketball. If I played on your team, I could help make everyone better, but once I left, the team would revert back to what it was. Maybe folks picked up a thing or two along the way, but the impact wouldn’t be what I wanted it to be.

So I decided to rethink how I did the work. To help me do this, I started with the premise that collaboration is very hard to do well. If it weren’t, we’d all be doing it already, and it would be simple for everyone to come up with examples of great collaboration.

Then I thought about what it takes to achieve things that are very hard. I thought about things like playing the violin or learning a language (my personal bane). And my conclusion was simple.

The more you practice, the better you will get at collaboration.

Things that are hard require lots and lots of practice to do well. Everyone is capable of doing them better. You either put in the time, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you generally aren’t going to be successful.

Simple, right? Maybe so, but to me, this was a revelation. I realized that everybody I ever knew or saw — myself included —who was good at collaboration had had lots of opportunities to practice, whether it was conscious or not.

How much practice do we need to get really good at collaboration?

Consider one example of high-performance collaboration: professional basketball.

Professional basketball players play six months out of the year — November through April, not including the playoffs. They play 82 48-minute games over the course of their season — about 66 hours total, or 11 hours a month.

11 hours a month! Great job, right? Of course, they’re working a lot more than 11 hours a month. The rest of the regular season — about 93 percent of their actual working time — they’re practicing, training, working on fundamentals, both individually and as a team.

We’re talking well over a 9:1 ratio of practice to performance. Performance, of course, is a form of practice, but the main distinction I’m drawing here is that, when you’re performing, the results count. You can afford to fail a lot when you practice — that’s all part of the process.

Think about your job for a moment. How much of your job relies on collaborating effectively with others? What percentage of your time do you spend practicing versus performing?

I’m not arguing that 9:1 is the right ratio in every context. But I’m going to guess that, for most of you, your ratio is pretty much the opposite of this, and I think that a 1:9 ratio is definitely wrong. Folks who care about getting better rarely consciously consider how they can practice more.

Our predominant culture believes that collaboration is some special knowledge that, once acquired, will magically make groups better. All of our learning mechanisms are oriented this way. We scour articles looking for magical tricks, we invest in magical apps, or we hire consultants whom we hope will share some magical secret.

At the end of the day, none of that works very well. If we want to get better at collaboration, we need to find ways to incorporate a lot more practice, to get our practice-to-performance ratios up.

How do we do this?

Supporting Practice

One way is to provide more structures for encouraging practice. To explain what I mean, consider fitness.

Fitness already has a culture centered around practice. We don’t technically need any structures to help us do that, but structures help. To understand how, let’s map out the ecosystem of structures that support practice in physical fitness along two axes: supply (how much of it is available) and cost.

We’ve got lots of books and free articles on the Internet that give us advice. Those go in the upper left of our chart.

You could work out with a friend or enroll in a gym or take a class or a bootcamp. Some of these things are free, and some cost money, but they’re all still relatively cheap, and there are quite a few options.

You could also hire a personal trainer. These are the most expensive options, and they’re the least used of the options, so we’ll put them on the lower right.

I’m going to claim that this is an ecosystem that more or less works. If we want to get fit, we can find all sorts of structures across a broad price spectrum that will support us in doing so.

What does the collaboration ecosystem look like?

As with fitness, you can easily find thousands of pretty decent articles that explain how to get better at collaboration.

There are plenty of one-off trainings, some of which might even be pretty good.

You could go to business school. This is more on the high-end in terms of cost.

And there are a plethora of folks like me — the equivalent of a personal trainer — you could hire.

This ecosystem favors the high-end. We have very few structures in the middle, which means that there are a lot of people who get left behind.

I would argue that, if we want to support more collaboration practice, we need the collaboration ecosystem to look more like the fitness ecosystem.

We don’t need as many options in the high-end, and we need something to fill in the middle. If we could figure out how to shift the collaboration ecosystem so that it looks more like this, then I think more people would be practicing collaboration. If more people practiced collaboration, a lot more groups would be good at it, and we’d start getting closer to this vision of a world where everybody’s baseline experience with collaboration is a great one.

Muscles

How do we shift the collaboration ecosystem so that we’re doing a better job of encouraging and supporting effective practice?

First, we have to get clear about what we’re talking about when we’re talking about “collaboration.” We need to get more concrete about what we mean by “collaboration muscles.”

Collaboration is an aggregation of several skills, some of which are context-dependent. For example, good communication — listening in particular — is clearly important. Your ability to recognize and navigate power dynamics in groups is also important.

Over the past four years, I’ve identified and refined a set of muscles in four different muscle groups.

Once we’ve identified specific muscles, the exercises (or workouts) start to become clearer. I’ve aggregated a bunch that I use on my website, which I’ve made public domain so that you can do whatever you want with them. I’m not going to say too much more about these now, as we’ll do a listening workout together after I’m done talking, and I’ll be leading power workouts in both the morning and afternoon breakouts.

What’s important to remember about these exercises in the context of practice is that doing them once or a few times or even ten times isn’t enough to be useful. You have to repeat them over and over and over again to develop your muscles, and you have to be intentional about how you practice.

Finally, once we know what the workouts are, we can start developing programs to support them — the equivalent of gyms or bootcamps, the equivalent of exercise “equipment” or apps, muscle assessments, etc. And voila, the ecosystem will start to shift the way we want it to shift.

Shifting Culture

At the end of the day, what I really hope to achieve is a shift in culture. I simply want people to associate improving at collaboration with lots and lots of practice. I hope that all of you walk away from this talk thinking about how you can integrate practice more in your own work and lives, and I hope you’ll try to convince others to do this as well.

If enough of us start doing this, culture shift will happen. Still, I don’t want to make light of how difficult this shift I’m describing will be, both societally and also individually.

Over the past four years, I’ve completely changed how I work with groups. Instead of being a ringer on a basketball team, I’m now their workout instructor. It’s been successful enough that I continue to do this work this way, refining the process along the way. My biggest takeaway, however, has not been how valuable practice is, but how emotionally challenging the journey can be.

To close, I want to share a personal story about what it takes to learn something hard through lots and lots of practice.

One of the things that I am really bad at is learning languages. I don’t speak Korean, which has always been a sore spot for me, as it’s prevented me communicating with many of my relatives and even my own parents, to some extent.

About five years ago, my mom invited me to go to Korea with her. In preparation for this trip with my mom, I decided to enroll in my very first Korean class. I knew that it would take a lot of practice to learn, and I used every trick in the book to try to support me in this. I had lots of people supporting me, and I was super motivated. But I wasn’t having much success, and it was killing me.

At some point, it hit me. Babies are really good at learning languages, and my sister recently had a baby! My nephew, Benjamin, is six now, but he was about one when I was about to go on this trip, so we were both learning a new language at the same time. I decided to watch him closely to see what tips I could pick up from him.

Here’s what I learned. Benjamin, my one-year old nephew, really sucked at speaking English. He was really, really bad. But what was different was that he didn’t expect to be good. When he did speak, everybody — including me — would go nuts! It didn’t matter if what he said made any sense or if he pronounced the words correctly. We would all laugh and coo and celebrate, and he would clearly respond to that. Learning a language, for my one-year old nephew, was a joyful experience, not a painful one.

This was a revelation to me. Benjamin took a good three or four years before he spoke English more or less fluently and correctly, and it was a joyful experience all the way. Here I was, beating myself up after a few weeks of Korean classes, where I wasn’t even fully immersed, thinking for some reason that I needed to be speaking Korean better than I was. What if I assumed that I was going to suck for a long time, and instead of beating myself up for it, celebrated the same way we celebrated Benjamin?

Getting good at collaboration is really hard. It takes practice to get good at it. If we’re really going to get good at it, we all have to learn from Benjamin’s example. We have to understand that we’re going to trip and fall and suck for probably a long time, but we can still celebrate the little victories along the way. And if we give ourselves enough time, we will eventually get so good at it that we won’t even think about it.

Imagine that. What would our world look like if we all became that fluent at collaboration?

Thank you very much!

Why I Do What I Do, and What That Means for 2017

Seven years ago, a friend challenged me to clearly articulate why I do what I do. She had repeatedly heard my spiel — adopted wholesale from my mentor — about society’s problems growing more complex faster than our ability to address them and the resulting urgency to get collectively smarter faster. She understood what I was saying, but as far as she was concerned, it didn’t fully explain why I was so passionately driven by this work.

I spent many months reflecting on her question, repeatedly asking myself why, and challenging myself to go deeper. The answer finally came to me in L.A., where I was visiting my parents and younger sister. We had gone to the beach together, a family tradition since childhood, and when we arrived, as if on cue, my family immediately splintered. Everyone moved in his and her own direction, with no sense of what anyone else was doing and no coherent rhythm. I watched this lack of synchronicity unfold before me and felt all sorts of old wounds rise up within me.

I was lucky to grow up in a family with lots of love, but — like all families — we had our share of dysfunction. Some of that dysfunction felt especially jarring, considering my parents’ strongly-held value of togetherness and mutual support. As a kid, I grew frustrated over watching seemingly little things disrupt our ability to be together, especially lack of listening, communication, and self-care.

I also had the good fortune of experiencing really great collaboration with others, starting with my love for team sports. I have always been a mediocre or worse athlete, but I quickly learned that teams that practiced together and that played with heart and smarts could easily transcend any individual shortcomings, and I grew to love how it felt to do that. In other collaborative pursuits where I already individually excelled, I found that I could channel my strengths into lifting others, which led to greater success than what was possible by myself and which felt even more joyful and satisfying.

I knew what it felt like to move together in sync and with power with others, and I wanted it in all aspects of my life. I knew that the fundamentals of this wholeness were simple, but not easy, and that small, but significant gains were easily within reach for most groups. When I met and started working with my mentor in 2000, all of this came together for me. I had discovered my purpose and my passion, and I was ready to make it my life pursuit.

2016 Lessons Learned

2016 was a hard year for me on two fronts. I had spent the prior three years experimenting with this notion that the key to high-performance collaboration was practice, and I had directed all of my energies toward exploring ways to encourage and support practice at scale. I wanted to spend this past year focusing on the things I had learned that felt the most promising. My goals were to:

Scale up my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program and Do-It-Yourself Strategy / Culture toolkits, while continuing to refine and improve them
Continue to find ways to support emerging practitioners, including finding ways to connect them with each other and offering real opportunities to practice with me and each other
Return to my consulting past by taking on a really big, really hard problem, incorporating the things I had learned over the past three years, while also telling the story of the work as it happened, so that others could learn from our successes and failures in real-time

While I did plenty of work I felt proud of, most of the things I tried did not work out the way I had hoped. More egregiously, I felt like I ended up making excuses that prevented me from trying things that were higher-risk, higher-reward. Specifically:

In general, I was not disciplined about writing up and sharing what I was learning in the moment, which resulted in only two blog posts in 2016, compared to seven in 2015 and 30 in 2014! I published more posts in this blog’s debut in December 2013 (five) than I did in all of 2016.
This lack of storytelling was particularly bad with my really big, really hard client project. We did good work together, and we also struggled at times. While we did the work transparently (including creating a public dashboard, synthesizing and sharing our framework for experimentation, modeling transparency internally, and inviting outside colleagues to shadow), we did not share enough context for what we were doing for others to be able to learn with us. Some of this was beyond our control, but there were other things that were simply failures on my part, including not writing a single blog post about the project.
While I did some work toward refining and scaling up Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets and the DIY Strategy / Culture toolkits, most of it was reactive rather than proactive, and even then, I was very slow to react. I ended up missing lots of simple opportunities to spread the word and involve other people. For example, Duende, my design partner for the toolkits, created an online store where you can order the toolkits, but you can’t find that store from my website. (Voila! The preceding sentence fixed that problem! More to come!)

While I didn’t accomplish my high-level goals, I don’t want to lose sight of the good things that happened:

Publishing blog posts is not the only thing that matters when it comes to sharing. It’s about the quality of what you share and the number and kinds of people you reach, regardless of medium. I found myself sharing and linking to my two 2016 blog posts more often than average. While I only wrote two, my colleague, Anya Kandel, became the first guest contributor here, writing two really great blog posts about her driving questions and experiences.
In addition to writing up the aforementioned experimentation framework (which I did in collaboration with my colleague, Alison Lin), we did an accompanying webinar in partnership with Social Transformation Project and Leadership Learning Community (LLC) that had almost 400 registrants, third all-time among LLC’s excellent five-year roster of webinars.
I published several of my collaboration workouts, with more to come. My lack of blog posts didn’t prevent my mailing list from growing, and you can now follow me on Instagram and Facebook as well as Twitter. I also made a bunch of subtle design and technical changes to this website, which will help support its ongoing growth and evolution.
I did a Do-It-Together Strategy / Culture Workshop in New York with Anya Kandel, my first outside of the San Francisco Bay Area and hopefully the start of many more.
I maintained the self-care success that I achieved in 2015, not a small feat considering how much work I’ve put into this over the past four years.
I met, worked with, and shadowed lots of great practitioners, especially the aforementioned Alison and Anya, through my informal meetups, my colearning experiment and a similar experiment with my friends at MAG, and my client work.
My client projects were meaningful, and I learned a ton from each of them. I did organizational culture work with Addapp, organizational strategy work with General Service Foundation, which included a strategy-focused Muscles & Mindsets program, and really meaningful work on network strategy and culture with Social Transformation Project, my heretofore un-blogged-about “big, hairy client project.” I got lots of practice, including designing and facilitating two unusually challenging meetings, and I identified lots of areas for ongoing improvement. In addition to having lots of new fodder to write about, I also developed lots of new infrastructure and templates that I plan on packaging and sharing this year.

It’s not that I didn’t accomplish good, valuable things. It’s that I have a larger goal that I care about, and the only way I’m going to have a chance at achieving that goal is through focus, discipline, and rapid adaptation. I’m trying to run a marathon, and while I worked hard and am in better shape now than I was a year ago, I’m not developing strength and endurance quickly enough to successfully complete that marathon.

Which brings me to the second thing that was hard about 2016, for me and for many, many other people.

There are many, many problems in the world today, and they all manifested in some very discouraging ways this past year. All of this divisiveness, siloization, and radicalization are what I and many, many others have been working so hard to shift and prevent for many, many years. These are fundamentally challenging problems, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s happening, but we can’t use that as an excuse not to be disciplined and accountable to how we’re trying to tackle these problems.

How do we know if we’re investing in the right places? Where should I be directing my energy in order to have the biggest impact?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do have hypotheses, and my intention has been to test them. My actions in 2016 were not fully aligned with my intentions, and I want to fix that. Which leads me to my three-year goal and my priorities for 2017.

1,000 High-Performing Collaboration Practitioners by 2020

I believe there are a set of core principles underlying high-performance, collaborative work. I believe we need lots and lots of people who understand those principles and who practice them with devotion and joy.

I practice these principles to the best of my ability, and I want to find others committed to the same principles, whether they are external practitioners trying to help other groups or internal changemakers embedded in their own groups. I want to learn with them, support them in their practice, and help the community grow and improve. By the end of 2020, I want to know of at least 1,000 of these practitioners all in movement together.

Why 1,000? Because I think that number is the minimum needed to sustain a thriving, growing movement.

Why by 2020? Because I think it will be very hard, but doable if I’m smart and focused about how I approach this, and because we can’t afford to wait any longer.

How will I accomplish this? I’m still working out the details, but I’ve got some ideas. I think there are three overlapping categories of activities needed to help catalyze this community of practitioners:

Model these principles myself and continue to practice and improve
Synthesize and share what I’m learning
Nurture and support other practitioners

Most of my past activities have fallen in some subset of these categories, as is the case for similar practitioners. But I’ve realized (through experience and lots of helpful feedback from others) that there are some key activities on which many of these other activities depend. I’ve largely neglected these activities, and I want to correct that.

2017 Priority: Draft a Set of Experience-Based Principles for High-Performance Collaboration

In particular, I need to clearly and accessibly articulate the principles that I think are foundational for high-performance collaboration. Drawing on my and other’s experiences to draft these principles will be my primary focus in 2017.

I often use the metaphor of how we need more chefs. In some ways, I’m saying I want there to be 1,000 “chefs” that I know of by 2020. We can extend this analogy further to explore how we might go about doing this.

One of the reasons I decided to start consulting again at the end of 2015 was my realization that we need more “great restaurants” in order to inspire people to become “chefs.” I thought one of the highest-leverage things I could do was to be one of those restaurants. I wanted to scale up how I modeled the principles of high-performance collaboration in order to inspire others to push their own practice.

I still think we need more “great restaurants,” but I no longer think that’s where my focus should lie. I need to be clear about what I think high-performance collaboration means and what the underlying principles are. Articulating those principles will help serve as a beacon for other practitioners with similar beliefs and commitment. It will provide a framework to help assess collaborative performance — the equivalent to a Michelin Guide in the restaurant world — which is an important step toward actual improvement.

I hope to have a first draft of these principles — which I’ll pull together in an open way with the help of my community (which I hope includes anyone reading this) — by the middle of the year, at which point I’ll use it as a way of scaling up my other activities. I will continue to model and practice, but it will all be in service of articulating these principles.

I’m excited about this renewed focus. It feels true to the reason I got into this business in the first place. I know what high-performance collaboration feels like, and I’ve learned a lot about helping others achieve it. I know that others know a lot as well, and that even more people want to know and learn. I think the path for supporting these practitioners — lots and lots and lots of practice — is straightforward, but challenging, and I’m excited about re-focusing my efforts to pave this path. I believe wholeheartedly in the world that is possible if we’re successful, and I’m going to do everything I can to help create that world.

High-Performance Collaboration Requires Experiencing “Great Meals”

I love eggs, but I’m not an egg snob. I used to scramble them by whisking them with a fork and cooking them quickly over medium heat. Often, I didn’t even bother with the fork. I simply cracked them whole in a cold pan, and stirred them up vigorously with a spatula as the pan warmed.

I had tried all the other best practices — using a whisk, adding milk or cream, folding them slowly over low heat — but, up until recently, I hadn’t found the results worth the extra effort. Then, a few weeks ago, I met a colleague at Boulette’s Larder for breakfast, where I had the best damn scrambled eggs I have ever eaten. They were tender, unctuous, and tasty, and they inspired me to revisit how I cook my eggs.

In my usual, OCD way, I’ve used every breakfast since as an opportunity to experiment. I haven’t quite replicated the Boulette’s Larder version, but my scrambled eggs are now significantly tastier than they ever used to be — enough so that I have permanently shelved my good-enough approach to cooking them.

I didn’t do any research, and I’m not using any new ingredients or techniques. The only thing that changed was that I had an experience that inspired me. That experience led to a renewed focus and a shift in how I applied techniques and ingredients that I already understood.

In my work as a collaboration practitioner, one of my mottos is, “Chefs, not recipes.” I believe this so strongly, I had it engraved on my phone. My insight three years ago was that practice was more important than tools for becoming a great chef, and I’ve been experimenting with ways to support and encourage collaboration practice ever since.

What I’ve come to realize this past year is that practice alone does not make great chefs. You also need to experience great meals. You need to understand what’s possible, a standard toward which you’re driving.

“Great meals” in collaboration are out there, but they’re in short supply, and they’re often not in the places most people are looking. I was lucky to have tasted the collaboration equivalent of some amazing meals early in my career, and those experiences continue to inspire me. I also see groups after groups that have not experienced great meals stop practicing after achieving minor gains. They settle, because they don’t understand what’s possible or what’s necessary for true high-performance. Their minor gains feel good enough, just like my fork-scrambled eggs.

Three years ago, I started with the premise that we needed an ecosystem of “gyms” where people could practice collaboration. I’m now realizing we also need an ecosystem of top-notch “restaurants” where people can experience great collaboration. It’s why I’m partially returning to my former practice of creating my own “great meals” and writing about them. However, this alone will not be enough. I don’t have any answers yet, but I’m looking forward to experimenting with possibilities in the coming year, and I’d love to hear your ideas!

Bring Groups Alive by Establishing a Rhythm

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named…. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

—Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are.

—Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead drummer, 1998 CNN interview

I strive to be a minimalist when it comes to designing and facilitating meetings, especially large ones. I get people into small groups as much and as quickly as possible, and I get out of their way. If I am thoughtful about the space I create, the questions I pose, and the tools I provide, then I can recede into the background, and the meeting runs itself.

When it’s working, I can feel the room vibrate. When people are engaged, when they’re leaning in, when they’re listening closely to each other, when they’re working, laughing, creating, converging, the group becomes alive. I can hear the group’s heartbeat, and I simply move along with it.

What makes groups come alive? I love Brooking Gatewood’s deceptively simple observation that what matters is that we feel like we matter.

How do we create conditions for people to feel like they matter? How do we support this, reinforce it, amplify it? There are no stock answers to these questions, and putting whatever answers you might have into practice is even harder.

If I had to focus on one thing, I’d start with rhythm.

In their book, Scaling Up Excellence, Stanford Business School professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao write:

Recent studies show that when people share rhythms with others they develop stronger emotional bonds and are more likely to pitch in for the common good. One study showed that even when a pair of strangers had never met before and didn’t talk, they still liked each other more if both simply walked in the same direction together, rather than in different directions.

…

When people share the same daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal rhythms, connections among them form faster and stay stronger. The people trust each other more deeply, and coordination becomes easier because they see and experience the world in the same way. (pp212-213)

In our drive to focus on issues of “substance,” we tend to forget about issues of biology. The notion that simply moving together physically might improve performance can be hard to believe, even in light of the research, but we ignore this reality to our detriment.

When we work together face-to-face, it’s easier to establish rhythms without being conscious of it. People have natural habits, reinforced by physical space, and rhythms sometimes emerge on their own. Still, skillful practitioners are sensitive to these emergent rhythms, but also don’t leave it entirely to chance. It’s why we see things like standing meetings and checkins in so many successful processes. What happens during these rituals may actually be far less important than the fact that they are simply happening.

When we’re not physically in the same space, establishing what Lisa Kimball describes as a “visible pulse” is even more important. Lisa (who has the best company name in the business) writes, “Human systems that thrive have a pulse… a rhythm… that connects and aligns them with the source of life. The essence of relationship is being in rhythm with others. To co-conspire, to breathe together with a group is a big challenge for collaborative groups in the same room together. It’s even harder for groups that are not in each others’ physical presence.”

Many years ago, I met a Disney IT manager, who shared an unexpected solution to a very common problem they were having. His whole team was based in Burbank, California, with the exception of one person, who worked in the Orlando, Florida office. This person predictably felt out-of-touch with the rest of the team. They tried a number of tools and process tricks to shift this, but none of them worked.

Finally, they decided to set up a video camera and monitor in the hallway of the Burbank office, and they left it on at all times. They put a similar setup in the Orlando office. That did the trick. Being able to experience the hustle and bustle of his California colleagues in an ambient way helped give this person a greater sense of connection to his team and to his work.

This strategy of starting with something natural and amplifying it is generally smart, but it can also surface new challenges. At my previous company of seven people, we used a wiki as a central repository for all of our notes. This gave us full transparency into what everybody was doing and thinking, and it also gave us the ability to work effectively at our own pace.

Most people followed the wiki by subscribing to email notifications, which would get sent whenever somebody made a change. The problem was that I had a propensity to think and write early in the morning or late at night, which meant that people would often wake up to a slew of emails. Even though I didn’t expect anyone to follow my schedule, I was unintentionally establishing a rhythm that others rightfully found stressful.

I didn’t want to change my habits, which worked well for me, and I also didn’t want us to lose the benefit of the notifications as an amplification of a natural rhythm. Our solution was to create a piece of software that would collect the notifications and publish a whole set once an hour and only during business hours. As an added bonus, we named the tool after a colleague’s dog and had it bark and grunt encouraging commentary along with the notifications.

By taking behavior that was already happening and making it visible (and fun), we were able to establish a rhythm without any additional work. However, we needed to slow it down and curate it (both of which we were able to do automatically) in order for that rhythm to feel comfortable.

Understanding what rhythm will work best for everyone is part experimentation, part conversation. My friends at Forward Together, a pioneering reproductive justice organization, have a wonderful physical movement-building practice called, Forward Stance, which is a spiritual cousin to my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program. It includes one exercise that not only highlights the importance of rhythm, but enables people to have a concrete conversation about how to move in alignment at different paces.

It starts by someone establishing a physical rhythm — some combination of sound and movement. The rest of the group is asked to follow the rhythm in their own way and at their own pace to demonstrate the relationship they want to have with the rest of the group.

This exercise gives people concrete language to discuss an issue that can feel somewhat abstract. We used it as part of our Future Forward project — which consisted of a dozen stakeholders across multiple organizations — to establish a sense of how we wanted to work together over the summer, when many of us would be traveling. The entire exercise took a grand total of seven minutes, and it helped us get specific in a way that simply talking about it would not have.

When we are collaborating at our best, everyone feels alive, and the group itself takes on a life of its own. By definition, groups that are alive have a heartbeat, a rhythm that everyone can follow.

What is the rhythm of your group?

Is everyone listening and moving to it?

If not, what might you do to establish a stronger pulse or to make it more visible?

Investing in and Designing for Trust

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.

Documenting Is Not Learning

Part two of a three-part essay on facilitating group learning. See also part one, “Getting real about experiments and learning.”

A few years ago, my friend and colleague, Rebecca Petzel, wrote about a participatory art exhibit where the artist asked, “What is transformation?” One of the replies was, “Moving beyond documentation.”

I laugh every time I read this, but I also shake my head. How and why did documentation become so synonymous with learning (or worse, transformation)?

My mentor, Doug Engelbart, always said that the distinguishing characteristic of a high-performance group was its ability to learn and improve. One sign that a group was good at learning was its ongoing care and maintenance of what Doug described as a “dynamic knowledge repository.”

When people asked Doug what a “dynamic knowledge repository” looked like, he always described something digital. That made sense. Among the many things that made Doug a visionary was his recognition that digital technology had the ability to transform the speed at which we act and the quality of those actions. It’s something I still believe wholeheartedly.

But there was always something that seemed inconsistent and incomplete about how Doug described these knowledge repositories. For one thing, he used the word, “knowledge,” not “data” or “information” — both de rigueur terms of the time. For another, as much as he talked about the potential of tool systems, he also stressed the importance of human systems.

Knowledge can manifest itself as external artifacts, but those artifacts themselves are not knowledge. The essence of knowledge is that it’s actionable, and humans can’t act on knowledge unless it’s in their heads. I can have a whole library of books on nuclear physics, but it doesn’t become knowledge until I figure out a way to internalize what those books represent. I can read all the books I want on how to ride a bicycle, but it’s not knowledge until I actually demonstrate the physical ability to ride a bike.

I know that Doug understood this. I had many deep, wonderful conversations with him about this. Doug focused on the digital, because he was always looking at what was possible, which was way beyond what everyone else could see. That was one of his many gifts to the world.

Today, too many of us are fixated on digitally capturing our knowledge. That is the wrong place to start. We shouldn’t be so focused on externalizing what’s in our head in digital form. We should be looking at the problem the other way around — figuring out how best to get knowledge into our heads. That is the much more challenging and important problem.

How do we do that?

The number one thing we can do to help groups learn is to create space and time for reflection. How many of you take the time to do that with your groups?

Externalizing our knowledge can be a valuable way for individuals to reflect and internalize, but it’s only valuable for peers and colleagues if they take the time to absorb it. In theory, having access to written forms of knowledge — digital or otherwise — gives people flexibility as to when they can sit down and read it, which is one way to create time. However, that time is easily outweighed by the possibility that reading someone’s writings may be the worst way to learn something.

Last week, I wrote about my eight-year-old nephew’s physics experiment. He was learning by doing (i.e. experiential learning) and through mentorship and feedback. Would it have been better if I had written down everything I knew about physics and emailed it to him?

What if, instead of spending so much time, energy, and money on trying to get people to share more information digitally, we assigned people learning buddies? What if we incentivized time spent in reflection and with each other? What if we created systems for shadowing each other and for practicing the skills we need to be effective? Wouldn’t those be better first steps toward facilitating effective group learning?

See also part three, “The Key to Effective Learning? Soap Bubbles!”