network – Page 2 – Faster Than 20

Civic Engagement Funders Aligning for Impact

Last year, a small group of foundations who fund state-wide civic engagement (the State Infrastructure Funders Table, or SIFT) embarked on a small, but important experiment, facilitated by my friend and colleague, Rebecca Petzel.

These foundations believe that democracy in the U.S. is broken, that it’s serving the interests of the privileged over the public. They have funded many successful initiatives to try and address this problem, but they continue to face tremendous challenges, many of which are a result of poor collaboration. Specifically, different philanthropic strategies often end up crafted in isolation from each other and therefore miss opportunities to align around common goals, especially when it comes to state versus national funders.

These foundations see similar challenges with communication, coordination, and collaboration among their grantees and have asked them to work in networked ways. But the foundations themselves have not been modeling that behavior.

Looking for a better way, Renee Fazzari of General Services Foundation and Mary Tobin of McKay Foundation wanted to see if they could get a small group of funders aligned around vision and strategy, and they asked Rebecca to help them design and facilitate that process. Twenty-five funders representing 12 different states participated in this three-months conversation, which was mostly virtual and which culminated in a two-day face-to-face retreat.

At its core, this project was about creating a space for funders to have a different kind of conversation with each other. It was about getting them to slow down, so that they could work smarter. The process surfaced discrepancies in their theories of change and the language they used to describe them, it strengthened their relationships, and it created a strong commitment to do something even bigger together.

The success speaks to the skill of both the facilitation and the participation. I got a chance to watch the process from afar, and I saw many things that were particularly innovative. The process was mostly virtual, which contradicts the widely-held view that a face-to-face kickoff is the best way to build the relationships and shared understanding necessary for success.

The virtual meetings were designed with the same care as face-to-face meetings, with strong technical support, checkins and checkouts, breakouts, breaks, and most importantly, shared display. All of this lent to a feeling that participants were in the same “room” together, and participants were shocked by the high levels of energy and enthusiasm that were maintained throughout the two-hour calls. Participants took shared notes during breakouts, and Rebecca used Dialogue Mapping to capture and facilitate full-group conversation. They then synthesized these notes, with the help of creative consultant, Amy Wu, into a beautiful visual storybook that told the story of their work.

By chance, I happened to catch Mary, Renee, and Rebecca in the same place earlier this week, and they graciously allowed me to put them on the spot and record some of what they learned on video. Unfortunately, as is often the case with networks of busy people, I could not catch all three of them at the same time, so I took two 15-minute videos — one with Mary and Renee, the other with Mary and Rebecca. This actually nicely models a good network practice — talk in clusters, leave a trail — and I’m happy to share what they said here.

Curtis Ogden on Initial Conditions for Network Success

As I mentioned earlier this week, I have the pleasure of working with Curtis Ogden on the Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative. We’ve been working with a fantastic new network on some very hairy challenges, and we’ve been talking a lot about how to setup a network for success.

I had the chance to capture some of Curtis’s thoughts on video Skype the other day, which you can watch above. I love his advice to “bring it,” and I loved how he articulated the different tensions that participants need to hold. It’s well worth ten minutes of your time to get a taste of Curtis’s wisdom and energy.

Update: February 5, 2014

Curtis blogged and expanded his thoughts on initial conditions for network success.

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!

Enrolling Participants in Networks (and Organizations)

I’ve had many wonderful responses to my post from earlier this week, where I described the real value of networks as a “lens that helps us better understand power.” I wanted to build on this post by sharing some examples of how I’ve applied this lens in past work. I want to specifically focus this post on the hairy challenge of enrollment in networks (and organizations).

In 2009, I designed and led an open strategic planning process for the Wikimedia movement. Typically, developing strategy is a process that is limited to a select few — in organizations, formal leadership. Even if we had wanted to do that (which we didn’t for a variety of reasons), it was clear that such an approach would not have had any teeth.

Suppose we had tried. Who would have been part of that select few? If we were to apply a narrow, organizational lens, we could have concluded that the executive leadership at the Wikimedia Foundation — the organizational steward of the movement, which at the time had 35 employees — should be responsible for developing the strategy.

This would have made no sense. While the Foundation controlled the trademarks and was the fiscal sponsor of the movement, it did not play any direct role in the editing or management of Wikipedia. Wikipedia and its sister projects had started and had become successful well before the Wikimedia Foundation even existed.

If the leaders at the Wikimedia Foundation had decided to create a strategy for the movement, who in the movement would have listened? Certainly not the majority of editors and developers who make Wikipedia work, many of whom — even now — are blissfully unaware of the Foundation’s existence or of its role. What good is a strategy that isn’t known or being operationalized by the people needed to make it happen?

It’s not that the Wikimedia Foundation leadership didn’t have power. It’s that power was distributed throughout the system, and that the Foundation had limited ways to wield its power. In fact, much of the Wikimedia Foundation leadership’s power had nothing to do with formal authority and everything to do with the relationships and trust they had built with community members. (This is one reason why the Foundation’s current search for a new executive director has been so challenging. It needs to find someone with the skills to lead a 150-person technology and new-media organization and also cultivate strong relationships with the Wikimedia community.)

Fortunately, the leaders at the Wikimedia Foundation understood all of this. They knew that any strategy that meant anything would have to be developed in a participatory way, that the people who made Wikipedia would have to own it. They were also in the exceptional position of being stewards of a community that understood large-scale, collaborative production better than most, so they knew that developing strategy this way should be possible. The challenge was how.

Obviously, we faced many challenges that were unique to the Wikimedia movement. But the reality is that this is a story that applies to every network, including organizations. How many people know what their organization’s strategy is, much less help their organizations implement that strategy? How could this be a problem in organizations where the power is clearly centralized?

Because it’s never that simple.

I spent much of 2011 helping the CIO of a global pharmaceutical organization improve collaboration both within his IT department (consisting of thousands of people all across the world) and across the organization as a whole. Most of our starting assumptions about what to do and how to do it were wrong, and it all had to do with my naive understanding of power in the organization.

We had created a highly iterative process to help groups within the company experiment with ways to improve their collaborative performance. It strongly resembled the Lean Startup methodology, with which I was not familiar at the time. (Eric Ries published his book, The Lean Startup, in late 2011, although he and an already burgeoning movement of practitioners had been blogging about it for several years.)

The CIO and his team had bought into the process and was picking up my team’s cost for any group in the company that wanted to participate. For a variety of (mistaken, as it turned out) reasons, we wanted to recruit pilot groups outside of the IT department. We were confident that our approach would immediately result in quantifiable improvements in collaboration. “All” it would cost the groups was their time to participate.

We spent three months making this pitch to several groups, and we got zero takers. We had lots of executive support, and we had no lack of meetings with decision-makers. We had some very good candidates, but the timing wasn’t quite right for them. We decided to shift our focus on groups within the IT department (where the CIO obviously had more direct leverage), but I don’t think this would have been necessary if we had had more time.

But that’s the point — time. Even though the CIO was picking up our costs (which were considerable), participants would have to invest their own time. Even though we had executive blessings from their division heads, those leaders weren’t creating additional time for the groups to participate (which, in theory, they could have by taking something off their plates). That meant that pilot groups would have to find their own time to participate.

Having executive support was a huge leverage point, but it was not sufficient. Our whole process was designed around network principles, but we had wished away the hardest part of any network project — enrollment — because we had a naive, organizational view of what would be required to get people to participate.

In my previous consulting company, we only took on projects sponsored by executive leadership, yet we faced this enrollment challenge every single time, regardless of whether we were working with an organization or some other type of network. We always had to figure out the leverage points beyond positional authority, and we had to design a process and space that would compel people to participate.

The Real Importance of Networks: Understanding Power

Over the past several years, it’s become en vogue to talk about networks. For the most part, I think it’s healthy and important, I’m glad that it’s happening, and I’m glad to be contributing to it.

However, I’m often troubled by the direction I hear these conversations taking. In the nonprofit sector and especially in philanthropy, I often hear people use the term as a new way to describe the same old rigid command-and-control worldview they’ve always had. The easy way to test for this is to substitute “organization” for “network” when people are talking to see if the meaning changes. In the for-profit sector and especially in tech, I often hear networks framed as an extreme reaction against the status quo. “Hierarchy is wrong,” people say. “Teams are dead.”

Why does so much of the conversation about networks fall under one of these two troubling and incorrect extremes? Why do people struggle so much to define them, much less talk about them?

What’s so special about networks?

Networks are special because they are a lens that help us better understand power.

Why should we care about power?

Because our ultimate goal with groups is to maximize power. The basic premise underlying collective intelligence and effective collaboration is that the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts. In other words:

1 + 1 > 2

You can frame this equation around power, where the goal is to maximize the power of every individual in such a way that the collective power is greater than the sum of its parts.

For example, imagine you are teamed up with two other people — Alice and Bob — and are asked to grow and cook your own food. Only Alice knows anything about farming. Only Bob has ever cooked anything before. You know nothing about either.

You would probably want Alice to be responsible for farming, and Bob to be responsible for the cooking. Being responsible means making sure it gets done right, not necessarily that the person responsible is the only person doing it. For example, once you all decided what you wanted to grow, Alice would be responsible for figuring out what needs to happen and for assigning the roles.

In this case, the assumption is that the people with the right knowledge should have the power. But how should the three of you decide what to grow and cook in the first place? Alice and Bob have relevant knowledge, but it’s not the only knowledge that should count in making this decision.

There’s no universally correct answer for how that decision should be made. However, we can explore some scenarios for how that decision might be made:

You are the designated, formal leader of the team, and hence, Alice and Bob defer to you.
You are bankrolling the assignment, and hence, Alice and Bob defer to you.
You and Alice are both 14 years old, and Bob is 32, so you and Alice defer to Bob.
Alice and Bob went to college together, so they naturally gravitate toward each other.
You and Bob are both men, and so the two of you naturally gravitate toward each other.
Alice is significantly taller than you and Bob, so the two of you naturally defer to Alice.

Let’s complicate the scenario further. What if you were an incredibly fast learner, and in the course of working together, you rapidly became a better cook than Bob? It might follow that, at some point, you should be responsible for the cooking, not Bob, or at least you should be co-responsible. How would the group get to that conclusion?

Power can come from many different places, some more explicit than others. Organizations are simply a form of formalized power. It’s easy to talk about and work with formal power, because we can see it, and because there’s some agreement behind it. But to assume that formal power is the only form of power that matters is faulty. This is typically the flaw with an organizational lens. It’s not that the lens is wrong; it’s that people fail to use other lenses to examine their groups.

Networks are the ultimate meta-lens. Networks consist of people and their relationships to each other. You get to decide how you want to define those relationships. An organizational lens is a network lens where the relationships are defined by the org chart. You could also define relationships by who talks to whom, or by who share certain characteristics (e.g. race, age, gender, etc.), or by how physically close people’s offices are.

All of these are valid, potentially important ways of looking at power within a group, because the “right” structure — the structure that maximizes the power of the group — may have nothing to do with the formal org chart.

Networks are not a rejection of hierarchy. Networks are a rejection of rigidity. A hierarchy is an efficient form of decision-making, as long as it’s the “right” hierarchy. Powerful networks allow the right hierarchies to emerge at the right time.

If you’re trying to figure out how to get the best out of your network (and remember, an organization is a type of network), don’t start by looking for recipes. Start by asking the following questions:

Where is the power in my network?
Where should the power be in different situations?
What kind of structures can we put into place to support this?

Starting with these questions will help you better understand the true meaning behind the many ingredients of successful networks — the importance of relationship-building, of sharing, of diversity, of distributing control, of openness, and so forth. It will give you a broader perspective on the structures — both implicit and explicit — that make your network perform.

Networks are a powerful lens for helping you understand and maximize power.

This post is also available in Turkish. Many thanks for the translation!

Network Mindsets and the Golden Rule

This past weekend, I participated in an education hackathon organized by EduHub for the charter high school, San Francisco Flex Academy. I love hackathons, but San Francisco is saturated with them, so I’m choosy about which ones to attend. I chose to go to this one because I was curious about SF Flex and, more importantly, because actual students would be participating.

I ended up on a team with two great students, Zach and Serena, both of whom were bright, passionate, and ambitious. One of Zach’s great desires was for more interaction with people in industry. He explained that he wanted to design cars, and he was hoping to learn from someone who did that for a living.

As I listened to him talk about his love of cars, I tried to think of people to whom I could connect him. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew, so I pulled another participant into the conversation and said, “Zach wants to design cars. Do you know anyone he could talk to?”

As it turned out, the other participant knew someone who worked at Tesla, and he said he would hook Zach up. I thought that was a generous gesture, but I wasn’t surprised by it. San Francisco is a small place, and in my world, these kinds of introductions happen all the time.

Zach was beside himself with excitement, and afterward, he went out of his way to thank me. All I had done was ask someone else in the room. That other person had made the actual connection, not me. My actions took minimal effort and felt instinctual and obvious. June Holley calls this “network weaving.” It’s a practice that’s deeply embedded in the circles I travel in, and I often forget that not everyone thinks or behaves this way.

When I was just getting started as a collaboration consultant over a decade ago, one of my first clients was the Federal Aviation Administration. A skunkworks group there had started some unofficial Sharepoint groups as a way to encourage collaboration across different departments. These online groups turned out to be very successful, and the powers that be wanted to support them officially. They hired us to help them scale this project across the organization.

Around the same time, I happened to connect with someone from the General Services Administration, who wanted my advice on how to de-silo his organization. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to apply my incredibly sophisticated Beverage De-Siloization Technique (patent-pending), so I decided to share it with him.

“I’m working with a guy at the FAA who’s interested in the same things you are,” I said. “Why don’t I introduce the two of you, and you can get a beer together?”

The exchange that followed was incredibly awkward. The GSA guy truly seemed not to comprehend what I was suggesting. Have a “meeting” after work?! With no agenda other than to connect and exchange stories?! While drinking?! What kind of witchcraft was this?! The GSA guy actually ended up turning down my offer, because he didn’t see value in the connection.

Maintaining the “right” level of connectivity with others is hard. Some people overdo it or do it thoughtlessly, overwhelming themselves and others with introductions to people. I think that most people don’t do it enough. I experience variations of my GSA conversation with others all the time. They don’t understand the value of connecting with others, they feel shy about doing it, or they’re simply not in the habit.

How can we make network weaving a habit?

It starts with the following mindsets:

Reciprocity (also known as the Golden Rule). Treat others the way you’d like to be treated. Find ways to help others as you’d like to be helped. Assume that others share the same value of reciprocity. Most humans do, and everybody is people.
Introduce and include others sooner rather than later. The earlier people connect, the more impactful the result.
Be thoughtful, but not rigid. Don’t connect people or ask for help thoughtlessly, but don’t make too many excuses either.

It continues with practices like these:

Ask yourself after every meeting, “Whom do I know who could help or who might benefit from this?” Once you’ve answered this, it’s often obvious whether or not to make an introduction or invitation.
When you find yourself wishing you could talk to someone, just do it. Find that person, and talk to him or her.
Once a month, make a new connection or deepen an existing one. The Beverage De-siloization Technique works wonders here.