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.

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Habits of High-Performance Groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investing in the “Basics” and Eating Humble Pie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habits Are Hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret to High-Performance Collaboration: Slowing Down

Run, Serena, Run!

At my previous consultancy, we used to spend a considerable amount of time debriefing every engagement, big or small. We were meticulous in our analysis, nitpicking every detail.

Over time, I started noticing a few patterns. First, I realized that our debriefs were largely ineffective, because we weren’t taking the time to integrate what we learned. We needed to be reviewing past debriefs before new engagements in order to remind ourselves of what we had learned and in order to hold ourselves accountable to improvement. Without that additional space, our debriefs were essentially exercises in self-criticism and generating lists, two skills we didn’t need to be practicing.

Second, a few things began to jump out at me as I reviewed our long list of things we could have done better. Almost without fail, when we had “bad” engagements, someone had slept poorly the night before. Or someone had been working while sick. Or someone had forgotten to eat breakfast that morning. (Forgetting to eat was my personal bane.)

We had spent hours and hours and hours debriefing, and this is what we learned:

  • When we didn’t take care of ourselves, our performance suffered.
  • When we didn’t take time to remind ourselves of past lessons, we repeated the same mistakes.

One of my mentors, Gail Taylor, is always encouraging me to seek the simplicity embedded in complexity. What I’ve realized over the years is that, when I find it, I often dismiss it. It seems too obvious. There has to be something else.

Slowly, but surely, I’m breaking this habit, and I’m starting to see more clearly as a result. Which brings me to my biggest insight over the past several months.

The best thing we can do to improve collaborative effectiveness is to slow down.

This has been coming up for me over and over again with all of my recent projects and experiments.

I’m currently doing an experiment with the Code for America incubator in trying to help new companies establish good collaborative habits right from the start. PostCode (the company with which I’m working) is working at a startup pace, and they’ve had inevitable challenges as they move through their storming phase.

Fortunately, when problems crop up, they deal with them quickly. In those situations, they’ve often reached out to me about possible toolkits to help them navigate their challenges. My answer has been consistent: Slow down. They haven’t found the time (beyond the work we’ve done with them, which has been too constrained) for critical conversations about organizational strategy, culture, and group dynamics. It’s understandable. They’re under a tremendous amount of pressure, and in those situations, conversations about strategy and group dynamics can feel like a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

Last week, I facilitated a practitioners workshop for the Garfield Foundation on collaborative networks. For one of the Open Space sessions, I led a group through the power workout I developed for Changemaker Bootcamp. We had a wonderful, nuanced conversation about power dynamics, and several people asked, “How do we make sure we have more of these conversations with our constituencies?” My response: “The first step is making the time.”

Telling others (or even yourself) to slow down is easy. Actually doing it is hard. We move fast because of external pressures, mindsets, habits, cultural norms, and so forth. We have little control over most of these things, and what little we can control is incredibly hard to change. But there are tricks that I’ve found helpful over the years.

Experiments. Changing habits is hard, and you will likely fail many times. Approaching the challenge of slowing down as a series of experiments helps. As I wrote previously, one of the keys to a successful experiment is to hold yourself accountable to the results. Failure is okay as long as you’re committed to the intention and are actively incorporating what you learn into new experiments.

If you are truly committed to slowing down, write it down. Write, “Slow down,” on a piece of paper, and put it up where you will see it. Actively devise and track experiments that will help you do this, so that you can monitor your progress and see what’s working and what’s not.

For important conversations — whether it be organizational strategy or a project debrief — schedule those in advance as part of your project plan, and track whether or not they actually happen. If they don’t happen, take the time to examine why, and devise another experiment. The beauty of applying an experimental framework is that simply the process of devising and tracking an experiment is an act of slowing down.

Checkins. My former business partner, Kristin Cobble, recently wrote a wonderful piece on the power of checkins. She describes them mostly in the context of meetings as a way to invite participation and to garner a sense of the collective whole. What I’ve learned over the past several months is that they also serve a much simpler, deeper function. They force you to slow down and reflect — even if just for a moment.

Starting last year, I embarked on a simple experiment with my friend, Seb Paquet, who’s based in Montreal and who, like me, works for himself. We decided to check in with each other once a week for an hour over Skype. We didn’t have any agenda. We would simply use that time to have an extended checkin.

We ended up doing two phases, and it served to be tremendously valuable. Not only did it deepen our relationship, it served several practical purposes. We both had an opportunity to give each other feedback on our respective projects. We supported each other when we faced challenges and cheered each other when we succeeded. The most interesting thing to happen was that, even when things got tremendously busy for both of us, we both stayed very committed to these checkins. They were not just nice-to-have; they were helping us work more effectively.

Inspired by these results, I invited my colleagues Pete Forsyth, Rebecca Petzel, Odin Zackman, and Amy Wu — who all work independently — to participate in a similar experiment earlier this year. We wanted to experiment with ways that we — as an informal network — could achieve the same (or better) benefits that people get from working in great organizations. In particular, we wanted to be more intentional about learning from each other. We called our experiment, Colearning 2.0, a play on the coworking movement.

We explored several things that we could do together, but we settled on doing weekly pair checkins, as Seb and I had done beforehand. There was some reluctance at first. One thing we all had in common was a frequent feeling of overwhelm, and taking an hour out of our week to “just talk” seemed burdensome. Not only did everyone end up finding the experience valuable, there’s a desire to continue the practice and take it to the next level.

I recently spoke with Joe Hsueh about his recent trip to Istanbul. One of the things that struck him the most about his trip was the adhan — the Islamic call to prayer. Imagine being in a bustling city of 14 million people where every day, at prescribed times, a horn sounds and the entire city goes silent. Imagine what it feels like to have that regular moment of collective, silent reflection.

I believe that checkins could be a powerful keystone habit that helps us slow down overall, which ultimately helps us collaborate more effectively. This is a hypothesis I continue to explore.

What helps you to slow down? What’s been the impact of doing so?

The Key to Effective Learning? Soap Bubbles!

This must be art (explored)

Part three of a three-part essay on facilitating group learning. See parts one, “Getting real about experiments and learning,” and two, “Documenting is not learning.”

Two months ago, I blogged about my experiment with Dharmishta Rood and the Code for America Incubator, which wraps up in another few months. The goal is to help startups — in this case, a company called PostCode — develop great collaborative habits in its formative stage. The theory is that it’s more effective to build good habits from the start than it is to try to change bad habits later.

About a third of the way into our experiment, Dharmishta and I started discussing whether or not we thought it was working. We thought that it was, but we weren’t sure whether or not the folks at PostCode would agree. “We’re missing soap bubbles,” Dharmishta asserted.

“Huh?!” I responded.

Soap, Dharmishta explained, does not naturally produce bubbles. Manufacturers add chemicals to make soap lather, even though the resulting bubbles have no impact on cleanliness. In fact, some chemicals have adverse effects, such as drying out skin.

Why do they do this? Because people associate bubbles with cleanliness. If we don’t see the bubbles, we assume it’s not working, regardless of whether or not that’s the case.

When assessing progress, how you feel matters.

  • If you’re learning, and you feel like you’re learning, then all is good.
  • If you’re learning, but you’re not feeling like you’re learning, then you have a problem. You may stop doing things that are working, because you don’t realize that they’re actually effective. This is where adding soap bubbles can be useful.
  • If you’re not learning, but you feel like you’re learning, then you also have a problem. There is where adding soap bubbles can be harmful.

Given this, how do you design soap bubbles into your learning processes that help, rather than harm you?

It starts by being real about what you can and can’t measure, and it quickly shifts to remembering what you’re trying to achieve in the first place. There is always an intention underlying our instinct to measure, but sometimes, the complexity around measurement causes us to forget that intention.

I’m generally trying to help groups learn how to collaborate more effectively. I want feedback mechanisms that reinforce good habits and discourage bad ones. In PostCode’s case, Dharmishta and I wanted to make sure that the team was communicating and making decisions effectively. We thought that we were seeing progress, but we weren’t sure that the team was seeing the same things we were. We were (and still are) worried that the team would discard the practices before they became habit.

We designed a monthly “assessment” to help PostCode track its progress, and when we started exploring ways to measure effectiveness around communication and decision-making, we decided to take a different approach. Rather than attempting to quantify those things (as we were doing with the other dimensions we were tracking), we decided to ask qualitative questions:

  • Please share up to three examples of great, effective communication over the past month.
  • Please share up to three examples where communication could have been better over the past month.

(We asked the same questions about decision-making.) These questions will not provide some “objective” measure of how well the company is communicating as a whole or whether or not it is improving over time. However, they will:

  • Encourage everybody to regularly pause and reflect
  • Surface people’s different perceptions of what is good and what is not
  • Identify problems that need fixing while they’re still fresh
  • Remind people to celebrate what’s going well

Most importantly, these questions will remind everybody that communication matters, and that they should be practicing consciously and with an eye to improve. The very act of pausing to answer these questions on a monthly basis means that they are. These questions act as soap bubbles, but they also help clean!

Measurement is important, but feedback is even moreso. Figuring out the right things to measure is hard, but creating feedback mechanisms is not. Soap bubbles may not give you objective indicators for tracking progress, but they will — at minimum — remind people of what they’re trying to accomplish and to be conscious of when it’s happening.

Photo by Umberto Salvagnin. CC BY 2.0.

Organizational Development as Product Design

Startup Habits Workshop at Code for America

I got my start in the tech industry. Even though that was a lifetime ago, I’ve carried over many lessons from that experience, and I like to keep one foot in that door. One lens I still carry with me is that of product design.

I’m currently embarking on an experiment with Dharmishta Rood, who runs the incubator at Code for America. The gist of the experiment is this: Changing organizational habits is hard. Starting new habits is easy. If you want to build a high-performance, collaborative organization, the best thing you can do is instill good habits right from the start. Incubators are in a great position to do just that.

Code for America is trying to help local government truly live up to its promise of for the people, by the people. Its central activity is a fellowship program that connects designers and developers with local governments for a year. Think Teach for America for geeks. On the surface, these fellows design innovative applications for local government. On a deeper level, these fellows help change the culture of local government. It’s an amazing organization, and I’ve been a proud supporter for many years now.

Sometimes, fellows want to continue working on their apps beyond the fellowship. Last year, Code for America started an incubator program to help their fellows do just that. One of the many things that Dharmishta does is find mentors and trainings to improve her startups’ chances at success. One of the services she wanted to provide for her current class — a great new startup called PostCode — was help with getting better at collaboration.

I’m looking for ways to scale collaborative literacy. Helping an incubator instill great collaborative habits with civic startups seemed like a wonderful opportunity to do exactly that. The twist was that I didn’t want to do the work. I know how to do that already, and I know that I’m not scalable. Instead, I wanted to see if I could create a toolkit that Dharmishta could implement on her own with some behind-the-scenes coaching on my part. Dharmishta and PostCode both graciously agreed to try this experiment with me.

This is essentially a product design challenge, and it’s been incredibly humbling. We whipped together a prototype in just a few weeks, but I based it on years of experience, and I thought it would be great. It’s been solid so far, but not great. Watching Dharmishta and PostCode work through the toolkit behind-the-scenes has been an exercise in frustration — not with them, but with my own work. It’s uncovered all sorts of flaws and faulty assumptions, and because I’m not the one implementing it, I can’t make adjustments on the fly, which I do regularly in my own practice. It’s providing value, but it’s not living up to my expectations.

Which is exactly the point. Unless you’re incredibly lucky, you’re not going to get it right on the first try. Good product design is about getting your best first guess out there as quickly as possible and learning as quickly as possible based on real world usage. You take your lumps early so that you have a better chance of getting to the right answer quickly (and cheaply).

I wrote in an earlier post:

In order to design an effective tool, [product designers] use powerful methods for understanding how their customers think and feel and for measuring the impact of their interventions. Most process designers would do well to learn the tools of product design.

Most process designers I know have a very limited toolkit. They are typically over-dependent on meetings to accomplish their goals. (The exception to this are folks I know in tech startups, who tend to have more of a — you guessed it — product mindset when developing their own organizations.)

The bigger problem is that most process designers do not spend enough time up-front thinking about how to measure success. This ends up being fine, because most don’t bother to assess their work afterward anyway, outside of a casual, gut-feel conversation with a very narrow set of people.

I can say all of these things without judgement, because I have been guilty of all of these things. Doing these things well requires a tremendous amount of discipline, practice, and boldness. Frankly, I don’t know many product designers who do all these things well either. But on average, I find that product designers have a very different mindset than process designers.

What exactly is this mindset? That you don’t know all the answers. That underneath your considerable experience lies a foundation of faulty assumptions. That the way to learn is to move forward constantly, but thoughtfully, to iterate rapidly, to assess obsessively, and to assume that you will fail many times before you succeed.

This is the approach that I’ve been taking with the “product” that Code for America and PostCode has been using. They are both tremendously busy, but they have been great about playing with the toolkit. PostCode is a company full of product designers, and that mindset is strongly engrained in Code for America’s culture as well. (Code for America is an ardent evangelist and practitioner of the Lean approach, whose chief evangelist, Eric Ries, serves on its board.) They understand the spirit of what I’m trying to do, which has helped me a lot in doing this experiment.

This shared understanding has also helped me explain some principles of organizational development with them. PostCode is grappling with the typical startup challenges — lots of opportunities, but also lots of uncertainty, the need to focus in light of this uncertainty, and the challenges of norming as a team in the midst of the thousands of other things they need to be doing. They need to go fast, but they also recognize the importance of slowing down.

We were discussing the challenges of deciding on decision-making processes, and I latched onto something very wise that one of them said: Sometimes, things will actually work themselves out if you just let them play out. You want to be thoughtful and reflective, but you can’t let that paralyze you. The value of actually trying something, then stopping to reflect, is that now you’re basing your decisions on real data rather than on a bunch of competing, subjective, abstract notions. That’s a product designer’s mindset, and organizational development practitioners would do well to adopt it.

The trick is finding the balance between doing the work and taking a step back, doing the work and taking a step back. That’s what I’m trying to help them do. It’s an incredibly hard balance to learn how to strike. Clients have been hiring me to help them with this for years, yet I found it extremely difficult to do myself when starting up my own company a few years ago. I continue to improve, but I’m still in that cycle of trying and learning.