practice – Page 2 – Faster Than 20

The Art of Aligning Groups

This essay is also available in French. Thanks to Lilian Ricaud for the translation!

My best experience collaborating with a group happened almost 20 years ago on a basketball court. I had just recovered from a back injury and was returning to my regular pickup game for the first time in two months. To my surprise, a bunch of new people had shown up that day, and I ended up on a team with four other guys I didn’t know.

It didn’t matter. That day, that game, we played the most beautiful basketball I had ever experienced. It was like a dance. No one was particularly great individually, but everyone knew how to play together. People moved without the ball, sprinting down the floor, screening and cutting. The ball barely touched the ground as we whipped it around to each other — dribble, dribble, pass, pass, pass.

We were playing fast, but I felt like I was seeing things in slow motion. I would pass the ball to empty spots, and the right guy would magically materialize just as the ball got there. Every basket we made was an easy basket, and we scored them in large quantities before finally putting the other team out of its misery.

The final score showed that we had collaborated effectively, but it didn’t tell the whole story. It didn’t say how it felt to play with that team, to be in flow with four other people, none of whom had ever played together before. Every movement felt effortless and joyful. I felt alive. The team felt alive.

Alignment Versus Agreement

People often ask how I measure effective collaboration. My answer is always, “It depends. What’s the goal?” Collaboration, by definition, is working together in pursuit of a shared, bounded goal. Whether or not you achieve that goal matters. However, how everyone feels in pursuit of that goal also matters. Success needs to take both of those things into account.

I think the word, “alignment,” conveys this nuance nicely by suggesting both directionality and movement. Alignment is dynamic. It’s irrelevant if the wheels in your car are in alignment if you’re not moving. Alignment is also not binary. If the wheels in your car are not perfectly aligned, you’ll still be able to drive. It just won’t be as smooth or as efficient as it could be. The level of resistance you experience is a measure of how aligned you actually are.

“Alignment” is not the same thing as “agreement,” although people often conflate the two. A group might verbally agree on a destination, but its participants might still move in conflicting directions. Conversely, a group might move in perfect lock-step without ever having explicitly agreed on where it’s going or how (as was the case in my pickup game). It might even achieve this while explicitly disagreeing.

This distinction is important, because it’s not necessarily hard to get a group to agree on something. One way is to make a statement that is so abstract, it’s both indisputable and meaningless. An example of something I often hear is, “We value collaboration.” Another one is, “Our goal is to better serve our customers.” Very few people would disagree with either of those statements, but by themselves, they’re too broad to mean anything. Agreement without alignment also often happens in groups with conflict-averse cultures, where people would rather assent than argue.

Being in alignment is different than moving in alignment. If the goal is for everyone to be moving toward the same goal in rhythm and without resistance, then everyone must both want to move in alignment with everyone else and be capable of doing this. You achieve the former by aligning. You achieve the latter by practicing.

How do you get a group into alignment? How can you tell when a group is aligned? And how can groups practice moving in alignment?

Alignment, Not Control

There is no one right way to get a group aligned. Sometimes, it just happens. More often than not, it takes work.

Most people seem to equate aligning as a top-down version of “getting buy-in.” In other words, someone — usually a person with positional power over everyone else — thinks really hard about the “right” way to do something, then tries to convince everyone else to go along with it with some combination of encouragement and threats, possibly integrating some feedback along the way.

This isn’t wrong, but it’s not the best way to motivate people, it doesn’t tap into a group’s full collective intelligence, and it doesn’t usually lead to great performance.

My philosophy with groups is that more perspectives lead to better outcomes. When it comes to goals and strategy in particular, rather than one or a few people coming up with their own ideas first and having others respond or comply, I want as many people as possible to think critically about the problem at hand and to co-create the solution. This is generally messier and slower (at first), because it requires people to align around language and worldviews and to struggle both individually and collectively. But that struggle leads to greater ownership and agency, which ultimately leads to higher performance.

Alignment obviates the need for control, but it requires stomaching the messiness of aligning. While the hallmark of moving in alignment is a feeling of flow, the process of aligning can feel exactly the opposite.

Building Alignment

What does a productive struggle look like? What does it feel like? How is it different from an unproductive struggle? How do you know how long to let it go?

The best I can offer are my own strategies for building alignment.

Ask and listen first. Give people a chance to think about something on their own first, even if you’ve already done a lot of your own thinking. If their thinking is aligned with yours, use their words, so that they see themselves in the work.

Write it down. We all lead busy lives. It’s easy to forget things, especially when they’re complicated. Capturing the state of people’s thinking, even when it’s messy, and constantly keeping it in front of them helps a group build on rather than reconstruct its thinking.

Put a stake in the ground. Stakes can be pulled out and moved, which means you don’t have to get it exactly right the first time. Don’t expect a group to align on the first try, especially if it’s about something that’s messy and complicated. Instead, get as much alignment as you can around something imperfect, move forward as much as you can, and revisit and revise based on your experience. The whole group will learn as it moves.

I use the “Squirm Test” and the “T-shirt Test” to help me gauge how aligned a group is. Simply put, if the group makes a decision, and someone starts to squirm, that person is not fully aligned. If people believe so strongly in a decision, they’re willing or even excited about wearing it on a T-shirt, they are aligned. Continue adjusting the stakes over time until the squirming goes away and everyone is wearing the T-shirt.

Create real-time feedback loops. Moving in alignment with others requires constant feedback. If you can’t see how your group is moving as a whole, you can’t adjust. The more real-time indicators you have (including the Squirm and T-shirt Tests) and the more transparently you work, the more likely others will be able to see and react to each other.

Remind each other what you’re doing and why. The best thing you can do when you’re struggling is to take a step back and remind yourself of why you’re going through this process. It’s helpful to remember times when you were in alignment with others and what it took to get there. It’s also helpful to remember times when you decided to take shortcuts without being fully aligned.

Moving in Alignment Is Hard

I’m particularly fond of physical (also referred to as “embodied” or “somatic”) practices as a way to viscerally remind yourself of what alignment looks and feels like and what it takes to get there. Pickup basketball is certainly one form of physical practice, but it’s not for everyone, and there are lots of other great practices that are a lot easier on the body.

One of my favorites is a group breathing exercise I learned from Eveline Shen, the Executive Director of Forward Together, a group that regularly uses a form of physical practice they call, “Courageous Practice,” as a way of staying grounded and aligned. It starts by standing in a circle and taking a few deep breaths together. You then add movement to your breath, raising your hand at a right angle as you inhale, and lowering it as you exhale. The goal is to breathe in alignment with each other. It helps to have a few people step out of the circle to act as observers, so that they can see how aligned the group actually is.

There are lots of different variations of this exercise. You can change the orientation of people in the circle, so that some people are facing inwards and other are facing outwards. You can stand in a line or some other shape. You can designate a leader or not.

It turns out that the simple act of breathing in alignment as a group is hard. Practicing not only helps you get better at it, but it also helps you develop strategies for moving in alignment that can apply to activities beyond breathing.

As difficult as it is to achieve perfect alignment, perhaps the most important lesson from this exercise is that, when everyone is trying, people are generally very good at breathing together. “Very good” is a worthy goal for any group trying to collaborate. As singular as that one pickup basketball game was for me, I’ve had many more experiences that were very good, and each of those were joyful, satisfying, and productive.

Alignment is a process. Set your expectations accordingly, and celebrate each victory along the way.

Many thanks to H. Jessica Kim and Kate Wing for reviewing earlier drafts of this post. Photo by Simon. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using the Goals + Success Spectrum Skillfully with Groups

This past year, I facilitated a number of workshops on the Goals + Success Spectrum, the tool I use to help groups get clear, specific, and aligned around objectives and metrics. It’s essentially a guided brainstorming activity (using sticky notes or Google Docs) where you categorize your goals across a spectrum — from Minimum to Target to Epic.

I’ve been focusing on doing trainings for this tool rather than my others, because it’s a low-overhead, high-leverage way to get groups aligned and practicing, which are critical steps toward achieving high performance. It’s useful for individuals and for groups, and people generally recognize its utility immediately, even without the benefit of a workshop.

In my workshops, I focus on helping participants experience the mechanics of the tool. They practice using it as individuals, then spend time reviewing each other’s spectrums in pairs and giving each other feedback. I offer no other guidance about using it with groups other than to follow the exact same instructions.

In practice, of course, using the tool with groups is harder than with an individual. Multiple people mean more ideas, and you have to figure out how to consolidate them. That requires critical thinking, communication, conflict, and convergence — all things that make collaboration hard in the first place.

My stated reasons for not offering additional guidance for groups are:

The tool itself is designed to address some of these collaboration challenges
I want groups to learn how to work through the harder challenges by trusting their own skills, by using the tool repeatedly, and learning and adjusting as they go. That’s ultimately the point of all of my tools — to help people develop strong collaboration muscles and habits through practice.

While these are true, I also just find it hard to offer simple advice about how to facilitate this with groups. Any tactical advice I might have is deeply intertwingled with my philosophy about collaboration, groups, and the design of my tools in general. I can’t talk about one without the other.

All that said, many participants in my workshops have asked thoughtful questions about how to use the Goals + Success Spectrum with groups, so I’m going to attempt to articulate the relevant aspects of my philosophy and answer their questions here.

My Beliefs About Groups

I believe that:

Most of the challenges that groups face stem from not talking with each other enough about the right things.
People are generally smarter than we give them credit for. If we give people the space and opportunity to be at their best, then we can tap into a group’s collective wisdom, which is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Collaboration is a craft. You will be bad at it at first, but with enough practice, you will eventually get better.

At their core, all of my tools — including the Goals + Success Spectrum — are designed to do three things:

1. Remind you to think about critical, foundational questions. These questions are easy to take for granted, but in our day-to-day grind, we often forget to think about them. In the case of the Goals + Success Spectrum, the questions are:

What would the spectrum of success look like for your project, from Minimum to Target to Epic?
What would failure look like for your project?

2. Encourage you to write down your answers so that you and others can see them. Forcing you to make the implicit explicit and specific helps you get clear individually and is a critical step helping groups align.

3. Make it easy to practice over and over again. My tools were designed to help you practice and develop strong muscles and habits around group process. The tools themselves aren’t as important as your group continuing to develop and use the right muscles.

My basic approach to using all of my tools with groups is to just use them. Get people in a room, run through the instructions, and see what happens. Groups often are more capable than they themselves believe. This is the best way to demonstrate that.

At best, the tool will encourage everyone to stretch their thinking, de-personalize the ideas, and help people feel heard, which will lead to safer, more constructive conversations. This, along with incorporating a greater diversity of perspectives, will improve the overall quality of and lead to greater collective ownership over the final outcome.

At worst, everybody will get to see what each other thinks, and you’ll learn something from doing the exercise. Make some adjustments based on what you learn, and try it again. And again. People will learn how to set better targets and how to navigate difficult conversations with each other. It’s like learning to speak a language or play an instrument. Failure is both inevitable and okay, as long as you continue to try and learn.

Facilitation Tactics for the Goals + Success Spectrum

Given all this, here are some of the questions people in my workshop asked about how to use the Goals + Success Spectrum, along with my thoughts.

Who in your group should use the Goals + Success spectrum?

Everyone. Talking through goals and success should always be a group exercise, not an individual one. Deciding on goals and metrics doesn’t have to be a consensus activity (and you should be clear about how decisions will be made up front), but coming up with good ones benefits from everyone’s voice.

That said, with larger groups, it may not be practical to bring everyone into the room for the whole process. In these cases, you should aim to have a representative cross-section of the group participate (which means it should not just be the leadership team), with entry points for everyone else to review and give feedback.

How does having groups use the Goals + Success Spectrum work in practice?

There are two constraints: space and time. Larger (simultaneous) groups require more physical space, both to be in a room together and to capture their thinking. It doesn’t necessarily require significantly more time to capture and read everyone’s ideas, because that’s happening in parallel, but it definitely takes more time to work through hard questions and conflict and ultimately converge and align.

I generally find that groups do not allocate enough time for to thinking through goals and success (the “what” and the “why”), instead preferring to rush to the “how.” Alignment is hard, but the payoff is enormous. It doesn’t help if everyone in a boat quickly starts to row if they’re not all rowing in the same direction. Agreeing on where to go might take time, but it will make the subsequent rowing a lot easier.

Why does alignment take so long? Because people’s perspectives are often rooted in deeply held beliefs, and understanding and reconciling those beliefs can take time. Again, groups don’t have to decide on goals and success by consensus. However, alignment is much more likely if people understand the underlying reasons behind a decision and if they feel others understand the reasons for their objections.

You can accelerate alignment through the tool in two ways. First, explore different scenarios before getting into arguments. Second, continuously synthesize and edit the spectrum so that areas of alignment and misalignment are sharpened. I often joke that using these tools with groups is ultimately an exercise in sticky note management, but it’s true. The more you can help keep it clean, the more the group will be able to focus on the important challenges.

While the tools are designed to support a healthy group conversation, they are not a panacea. Any time you’re having a group discussion, group dynamics come into play. By giving everyone an opportunity to fill out and share their ideas on stickies, the tool encourages inclusion. However, once people start talking about the ideas, the tool can’t prevent the voices of a few from drowning out everyone else’s, for example. If this is a frequent problem, you may want to consider appointing a facilitator from either inside or outside of your group.

How would you use the Goals + Success Spectrum across multiple groups within a larger organization or group (e.g. cross-functionally)?

One of the reasons I love doing the Goals + Success workshop is that it’s a great way to build community, because looking at a filled-out spectrum is a great way to get to know another person or group quickly and more deeply. Knowing that your group works on housing issues tells me a little bit. Knowing that your group is trying to create housing for 10,000 people in one year tells me a lot more.

Similarly, the Goals + Success Spectrum can be a powerful way to help de-silo an organization or network. I would have each sub-group do their own spectrums first, then bring all the groups together to gut check each other’s spectrums. Celebrate where the different spectrums complement each other, discuss where they conflict and why, and make adjustments in the respective spectrums.

Most importantly, put the completed spectrums somewhere so that everyone can easily find and see each other’s.

How do you use the Goals + Success Spectrum to assess success or failure afterward?

I start every debrief by asking everyone to review each column of the Goals + Success Spectrum and to mark the ones we achieved and the ones we missed. (I use this debrief template to guide the process.) If there are differences in opinion as to whether or not we hit a mark, that’s both an opportunity to make meaning of what happened and to come up with a more specific and objective metric for next time.

If the group has missed marks in the Minimum column, then the project is technically a failure. This is an opportunity to discuss whether or not you had the right minimum targets and to make adjustments for next time.

Aligning around success is a craft. If you do it repeatedly, you will get better at it over time. Use your spectrums to help you with your assessments, but also recognize that the assessments will help you create better spectrums next time.

Eating Humble Pie: Lessons in Listening

The most fundamental exercise in my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets workout program is the “one-minute drill.” It’s the first exercise people do, and we repeat it several times throughout the course of a program. It’s an exercise in listening deeply and showing that you’re listening.

Even though it seems simple, people quickly discover that it’s not. Really, truly listening is hard. Furthermore, being capable of listening well isn’t the same as actually doing it. When I work with groups, even skillful ones, I often see good listeners talking past each other. All too often, we’re distracted by other things, including our own emotional states.

Making people feel heard — which is deeply intertwined with listening, but is not the same thing — is even harder. The one-minute drill helps you quickly and objectively recognize how hard these things are. It humbles you without humiliating you.

I don’t just lead workouts, I do them myself. I’ve done the one-minute drill hundreds of times with many different people, and I always seem to learn something new. Recently, I’ve been working out with my friend and colleague, Kristin Cobble. The past few times I’ve done the one-minute drill with her, she’s docked me points. “You’re reflecting back everything that I’m saying,” she explained, “but you’re not acknowledging how I’m feeling.”

She was absolutely right. I am very good at listening for substance and at reframing and reflecting back the essence of the content. It’s one of my strengths as a facilitator. But sometimes, people aren’t actually trying to convey a substantive message. They’re trying to get you to understand how they feel.

I had heard the emotion that Kristin had conveyed in the one-minute drill, but I hadn’t recognized the importance she had placed on them. Upon receiving her feedback, I was able to see what I had done and adjust my reflection accordingly.

However, it’s not always that straightforward. If someone is expressing anxiety, for example, how do you acknowledge that? Saying, “You seem really anxious,” might be appropriate in some circumstances, but it’s almost certainly the wrong thing to say in others. How you say it also matters. If someone is feeling excited, the words, “You seem excited,” may not be appreciated if your tone feels apathetic or resentful.

My experience with Kristin was timely, because I’ve run into this exact issue twice (that I know of) in the last month. In both cases, I was having difficult conversations with colleagues. In both cases, I was relatively calm, I was breathing slowly and consciously so that I could listen more deeply, and I reflected back the content of what I heard. And in both cases, my colleagues let me know that they didn’t feel heard.

It was frustrating to get that feedback, and if I had not had similar experiences with Kristin in recent practice sessions, I might have missed what was happening. In one of those cases, I was able to make the adjustment, but not in the other. Honestly, I’m still not sure what I could have said in the other case both to truly hear my colleague and to let her know that I heard her. That’s why I keep practicing.

In 2009, I worked with a think tank that was trying to grapple with very hard public policy challenges through both traditional, expert-oriented methods and bottoms-up, participatory processes. The first challenge we took on was clean energy. We kicked off our process with a day-long gathering in San Francisco with about 200 participants. The plan was to let the conversation go in multiple directions throughout the day, then weave it all together into something coherent that we would share at the end of the day. It was essentially a listening and reflection exercise at scale.

We asked our friend, the brilliant Katherine Fulton, to take on the difficult task of distilling six hours of discussion into a 10-minute talk in more or less real-time. She listened deeply throughout the day, as she is so skilled at doing. Then she went up on stage, and said to the audience, “Raise your hand if you feel scared.”

Most of the participants raised their hands.

“Raise your hand if you feel hopeful.”

Most of the participants raised their hands.

“I think that’s the essence of human condition,” Katherine opined. “I don’t think we’re going to fix this with just rational argument or all the great innovative ideas in the world. We have to have those. But the energy to do it and the will to do it is actually also going to have to come from another part of the human spirit, from our resilience.”

I still vividly remember how the energy of that room felt as Katherine got us out of our heads and into our hearts. She recognized that trying to reflect back what everyone had been saying was an exercise in futility and — in that moment, at least — would lead to more harm than good. What we all needed from her in that moment was an acknowledgement of how we were feeling.

I learned something very important watching Katherine that day, and I continue to work on developing this muscle. I’ve gotten better, but I still have a ways to go, as my experiences this past month reminded me. That’s why I keep practicing and encouraging others to do the same.

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!

Building Ecosystems in Organizations: Lessons from Gap Inc.

Editor’s Note: I am constantly on the lookout for great collaboration practitioners who share my values and whom I can learn from and practice and partner with. I had the pleasure of meeting Anya Kandel two years ago, and I was taken by the quality of her work and the intensity of her inquiry. Her experiences are eclectic, and her thinking and work is powerful. She very graciously agreed to share some of her learnings and questions here. This has also been cross-posted on Medium, where you can follow Anya’s other writing. This is the second of a four-part series. Part one was, “Understanding Sustainable, Collaborative Change.” —Eugene

For the past three years, I worked to build “innovation capacity” at Gap Inc. The work required us to explore the complexities of driving change within ingrained systems and behavioral norms across multiple communities, teams, and brands. Throughout my time there, I asked myself (and my colleagues) this not so simple question:

How do we build thriving, innovative, and strategically-minded organizations and communities that are sustainably driven by the individuals that comprise them?

I don’t have all the answers of course, but I do have ideas and approaches that worked for me:

People and context before process and model
Learn through the work
Democratize strategic thinking and innovation
Coordinated access to strategy and culture tools + practice
Do It Together

1. People and context before process and model

Working at the intersection of innovation, management consulting, and strategy, I witness a big emphasis on model in all these areas. Models are what firms sell in order to scale and what clients use as reference for understanding consultants’ approach and impact. These models, frameworks and processes are important… as tools. But ultimately what makes innovation and strategy consulting firms successful and covetable are the creative, intuitive, and smart people who work there, armed with an understanding of the various processes and techniques that support them to think strategically.

Design Thinking is a good example. It is a rich model and process that works well for many challenges. The philosophy behind the model — one that invites empathy, observation and collaboration in the process of organization and product development — has informed the way we think about problem solving, particularly in the world of business. But, IDEO, grounded in David M. Kelley’s Design Thinking approach, does not sell multi-million dollar projects simply because companies want to buy this model. (It is already accessible and free.) Organizations keep coming back to them because they have a diverse set of creative, strategic, and dedicated people who (with a robust toolkit and lots of experience) can approach every client request in a unique way.

The models (especially sold by innovation firms) aren’t as different as one might think. The power is in the people (those who facilitate, those who participate, and those who work to bring new ideas to life). A good strategic practitioner understands the people and the context, and pools the resources they need to design a process that works best for that specific case. A good approach enables the client / participants to understand the context of various scenarios and problems, ask good questions, and match processes models to context. A good outcome is when an organization, team, or community has the capacity to learn and grow from the experience and continue to evolve the work on their own.

2. Learn through the work

During my time at Gap Inc., I worked to build an internal innovation consulting group. We facilitated teams to solve complex challenges, we designed trainings and systems in order to grow innovation capacity, and we helped teams solve complex business challenges and create new products. In our work, there was certainly no lack of innovative ideas. That was the easy part. The hard part was creating vision and environment where those ideas could surface, as well as a culture that supported ongoing experimentation to help bring those ideas to life.

Initially, we spent much of our time fixing things that weren’t working (rethinking products, systems, and ways of working) and facilitating sessions that solved immediate problems. In parallel, we began to train employees within the company in creative group facilitation, building a force of innovation catalysts. They learned through the “work” of managing innovation projects and co-facilitating with us.

The projects that stuck and the initiatives that had the biggest impact were always those that allowed the catalysts and the collaborators to be the work, instead of receive it. This required them to solve real challenges and test new ways of working in a safe environment.

One of my favorite experiences came during an innovation initiative with a creative leader in store experience and design. We introduced her to a co-creation process, where customers worked collaboratively to evolve what she and her team created. It was amazing to see the shift from theoretical appreciation to active engagement, from the fear of getting something wrong to the discovery of new creative ways of working. From then on, she was able to integrate co-creation and prototyping into her work, recognizing not only the feeling of creative breakthrough, but the visceral understanding of how hard it can be to bring those ideas to life.

Still, given the size of the company and the scale of work we had, our engagements were often confined to executive leadership or isolated teams. Working solely with leaders to build a culture of innovation based on yearly priorities is not enough. Inevitably, leadership and strategy changes, initiatives are dropped, and the pressure of immediate business needs can trump almost anything, no matter how important we think it is.

“Learning through the work” is imperative, but only as powerful as the people who are enabled to actually do so. It wasn’t that our initiatives weren’t big enough or unsuccessful. Rather, we needed to scale or evolve in order to influence the diverse subcultures and teams within the company. We needed to democratize innovation and build a long lasting culture that celebrated experimentation, collaboration, and strategic thinking.

3. Democratize strategic thinking and innovation

Soon after joining Gap Inc., I started to explore how to create alternate spaces for communication that could scale and that skirted hierarchical limitations.

I noticed a disconnect between the leadership’s desire to understand Millennials and the overwhelming majority of Millennials who worked inside the company. Here lay a tremendous opportunity to bridge that divide and create environments for open communication between people who were making decisions and the young people who had insight into how those decisions would impact people like themselves. Plus, we are community of people who inherently function in a networked environment — what was naturally part of our lives outside the company often seemed insurmountable inside.

I started a group called the M Suite, a nonhierarchical, transparent network of Millennials dedicated to building co-creation and collaboration across brand and function. Functioning like a node in a network, M Suite connects people in the organization who were looking for creative input and collaboration, with the very large community of people eager to help solve creative challenges and share their perspectives.

Building our own infrastructure became an experiment in establishing networked, collaborative communities functioning within a hierarchical infrastructure. We used ourselves to explore unique models and approaches. We experimented with different ways of meeting, communicating, and solving problems. We tried different models for governance. We tried partner leadership. Eventually we arrived somewhere between a Holocracy and a leadership network, and officially took the form of an ERG.

Because our work was inherently related to change and the way we worked was very different from our surroundings, our presence invited reservations too:

“What if they don’t know the bigger picture and choose the wrong problems to focus on?”
“Why spend time building visionary ideas and solutions to complex problems when they don’t have the power to implement upon these new ideas?”

Clearly, the notion of “democratizing innovation” and building networks can feel really scary to organizations that rely on more hierarchical way of working. However, I found that these reservations often highlighted circumstances that already existed (i.e. lack of alignment or unclear vision). We never saw their work undermine high-level strategy, but rather elevate the strategic questions and conversations around it.

Democratizing innovation doesn’t necessarily imply that the work of innovation is everyone’s job or that an organization loses all its structure. Rather, it starts with furnishing everyone the respect and equal opportunity to engage in the creative process and think strategically. By expecting this community of individuals to thoughtfully own their work and ask good questions, we invited them to to engage that way. By giving them the tools to walk into any meeting with a strategic mindset, we created an environment where everyone was more likely to try to understand the broader vision and understand what “alignment” could really look like. In fact, they helped to be catalysts for the leadership team, bringing Millennials from various parts of the company to collaborate on the development of leadership goals and help bring them to life.

The desire to join the M Suite was impressive. People from across the company and around the globe participated, hungry to contribute to the evolution of the company. This fitful enthusiasm also reminded me of the social movements and community networks I have worked with in the past and the challenges their emerging organizers faced. The M Suite was soon confronted with the need to fuel a large number of people with the ability to govern themselves differently from the environment they were situated in and the organizational frameworks they were familiar with.

4. Coordinated access to strategy and culture tools + practice

The transition from a conceptual understanding of new systems for working and the actual act of implementing is often conflated with the apparent necessity to already have that systems in place. Of course, this can’t happen. The transition itself implies a journey from one to the other. And the journey is invariably messy, personal, multifarious, iterative, and nonlinear.

We (M Suite co-founders and new board) were called upon to define how to govern ourselves, while still leading. Our growing network of communities were looking for guidance in how to evolve, potentially in very different capacities. The organizers were hungry for tools and techniques that could help them understand how to lead and facilitate collaborative engagements. Plus, they needed to learn tactical strategies for managing the work while also doing their day job.

To answer that need, we organized trainings in innovation project management, client engagement, and collaborative problem solving. We initiated opportunities for shadowing. (At one point, I had eight people shadowing me in a client intake session.) We organized skill shares. We created opportunities to own projects in partnership with those experienced in leadership. We experimented with online tools. We tried new board structures.

We focused our attention on the development of the M Suite board first. This worked, to a certain extent. We became a community for collective learning and growth, and actively serving on the board became a venue for discovering individual potential. Our board members chose to stay at the company longer than they had planned, thanks to the opportunities we provided; or they left earlier than planned, because of the opportunities they realized. In effect, all of the board members were promoted (or promoted themselves by leaving the company) within a year of serving on the board. The need to cycle in new leadership was a happy consequence, but not always an easy one.

Our projects were successful, we grew internationally, and we gained a good reputation in some pockets of the organizations. But the group also became an oasis, striving to become a movement. And it was at this point that I left the company, along with the brilliant original co-founders of the M Suite, Rona Kremer and Jessica Talbert. If I have any regret, it would be not fully figuring out how to embed networked leadership skills and build the strategic “muscles” and tools so that they could more easily drive the creative process on their own and expand more quickly.

As I step away from Gap Inc., the question remains:

How to enable awesome groups like the M Suite to have impact and thrive? How to find ways for people to experiment and engage with the many tools and resources we already have on hand?

I have a lot to learn in this area, but luckily, I have had the privilege of collaborating with and learning from practitioners who are specifically focused on building accessible tools for capacity building. And against Eugene’s wishes, I am going to have to brag about him in his own blog. (Sorry Eugene.)

Eugene stepped away from his founding role in the consulting company, Groupaya, to tackle this very challenge. For the past four years, he has dedicated his time and energy to understanding how to build organizational culture that allows the individual and the organization to thrive. Through this open experimentation with Fortune 500 companies, government organizations, and leadership networks, he is meeting head-on the very difficult work of long-term change.

Eugene’s work has complemented a deficiency I found in many innovation and co-creation initiatives, including my own: accessible, foundational tools and techniques for individuals to be able to actually practice how to work strategically and collaboratively. These resources are public domain, meant to be tools that everyone can use and evolve within their own context. Also, check out Lisa Kay Solomon’s work, which provides a rich foundation in designing strategic processes. She has two fantastic books: Design a Better Business and Moments of Impact. I have no doubt that all of you have a plethora of other resources too, which I encourage you to share in the comments below.

These colleagues have helped me to better understand that matching access to practice is simple but powerful. If everyone has the tools and resources to think strategically, then slowly but surely we can build an ecosystem of individuals and organizations that can thrive together.

5. Do It Together (DIT)

We must create opportunities to build connections that allow us to look beyond “best practices,” models, or frameworks, and utilize each other.

An ecosystem is only as healthy as the biomes within it and the strength of connectivity between them. Beyond the immediate development of communities and teams, my most successful innovation and strategic initiatives have been those that invited people to step out of their own realities (via guest artists, makers, new collaborations) to realize new ways of seeing themselves and possibilities for change.

As a strategist and facilitator, I am increasingly exploring the balance between carrying a group through a transformational experience and curating a set of circumstances and resources that enable a group of people to find what they need in each other. We need both, of course. But if, by the end of our time together, I disappear and they forget to say goodbye, I consider this a success.

In fact, I just received a beautiful invitation for an event hosted by the well-branded M Suite, where they are driving conversation with internal Millennials, external creatives, and all employees. It was a small moment of pride, and I hope that our (the founders) step away has translated into collective greater ownership and autonomy.

The world is made of amazing people doing the work that strategists like myself try to inspire. The more we are not needed, the better. But clearly our work isn’t going away. Many organizations and teams, especially in smaller purpose-driven organizations, seek support but do have the funds and access to strategic coaching that is sometimes required to shift circumstance and behaviors that inspire innovation and change.

So then, how close can we get to putting me out of job? How might we pull back the curtain (often weighed down by the fear of losing IP) and share systems, tools, models and approaches across origination and field?

This has been a fun and challenging question to explore with colleagues like Eugene. Drawing on the DIY (Do It Yourself) mentality that utilizes the power of the network for individual development, we are developing strategies to Do It Together (DIT) and ignite the power of peer groups in order to bridge high-level strategic support and training with access to learning communities and support networks.

So far these efforts have resulted in a growing community of practitioners eager to share what they know and grow their personal practice (no matter the industry). Exchanging and fusing approaches has also provided us a great opportunity to challenge the bounds of our own frameworks and tools and think about what it really means to move people and ideas.

There is so much to learn! Please do join us in the experiment. Share your thoughts below. Try Eugene’s tools, and share your own. Join our workshop. Find collaborators in worlds you might not otherwise speak to. And if you are looking to be matched with one, I might be able to help.

Thanks for listening!

This is the second of a four part series. You can also find this post on Medium. Part one was, “Understanding Sustainable, Collaborative Change.”

The top photo is of Anya Kandel and Jessica Talbert, Gap Inc. M Suite cofounders. The second photo is of Rona Kremer, another M Suite cofounder. The last photo is from Eugene Eric Kim and Anya Kandel’s October 2016 Do-It-Together Strategy / Culture workshop in New York.

Loving vs Hating Process

When you fall in love with the process, and you do it the right way, you have a winning mindset, and the culture is set to make that push and build a winning team.

—Tyson Chandler, NBA basketball player

A colleague was telling me about a challenging client project the other day, which included her client flat-out saying to her, “I don’t like process. I just want to get stuff done.”

I hear this all the time. It may surprise many that I actually feel the same way. I’d love to be in better shape, but I hate running, so I’m not. I’d love to play an instrument, but I hate practicing, so I can’t.

Which is exactly the point. Regardless of whether you love or hate process, you can’t get stuff done or be a high-performer without it. The harder the work you’re trying to do, the more this holds true.

I can empathize with people’s dislike of process as long as they can also acknowledge its necessity. The problem is that many do not acknowledge this. I often see people resist doing things that feel “process-y,” such as taking the time to build relationships, developing shared language, or getting aligned around strategy and culture, because they claim it detracts from the “actual” work.

I find this weird and troubling. In music or in sports, you don’t ever hear professionals object to practice because it’s too process-y or because it detracts from the real work. Everyone in these fields knows that process is the real work. I was reminded of this while watching Episode 3 of The Players’ Tribune‘s excellent video series, Rookie/Vet. (Tyson Chandler’s quote from above starts at the three-minute mark.)

I want to shift our mindsets in our field around process and practice. I want people to see collaboration as a craft and to understand that improvement requires practice. There are no shortcuts or magical substitutes. Moreover, the things we’re trying to accomplish via collaboration also require process and practice. It behooves us to acknowledge this and to learn how to get good at it if we truly want to “get things done.”

On the flip-side, those of us in the business of designing and facilitating process have to hold ourselves accountable for why people might have a negative attitude toward process in the first place. One reason is that their experiences with it are poor. If we believe that good process will lead to good results, then we need to do that and hold ourselves accountable to the results.

Fields that embrace a process mindset, such as sports and music, already do that. Tyson Chandler has the credibility to tell his younger colleagues to trust the process, because he’s been a good teammate his whole career and has won a championship. If we want to convince others to trust our process, we have to design with intention and integrity. The more we practice doing this, the more that results will follow.