practice – Page 3 – Faster Than 20

High-Performance Collaboration Requires Experiencing “Great Meals”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming out of Retirement

I’m coming out of retirement.

When I left my consulting firm three years ago, I had a simple premise that I wanted to test: Anyone could get good at collaboration with enough practice.

I wanted to test this hypothesis aggressively and honestly, and I wanted to challenge every assumption I had about how best to do this work. In order to help others solve their own collaboration problems, I had to stop designing and facilitating custom processes for them, and instead focus on how to help them develop their own skills. I often had trouble explaining what I was doing and how it was different from my previous work, so I just told people that I was retired.

Retirement was fun and generative, but hard. Challenging my assumptions at times felt like my identity was unraveling, which was humbling and emotionally taxing. Moreover, few — even close colleagues — understood what I was trying to do.

Still, it was worth it. I am both a better practitioner and a better person. I learned an amazing amount, and I think I can have a much bigger impact on the world as a result. I’m excited to continue to build on what I’ve learned, and I have a growing community of practitioners who are also engaged with the work I’ve been doing. I also love the life balance I was able to achieve over the past three years, and I’m not about to give that up.

So why am I coming out of retirement?

One of my primary points of emphasis these past three years has been around field-building. When I decided I wanted to devote myself to collaboration professionally over a dozen years ago, I had amazing mentors who were incredibly generous with me.

Furthermore, no one expected anything of me, which was good, because I didn’t know anything. I spent my first four years trying stuff and failing, trying stuff and failing. I was able to come into my own on my own, which was an incredible luxury, and by the time I retired at the end of 2012, I felt like I was at the top of my profession.

My path was fruitful, but challenging. I made it because I was passionate, persistent, and very, very lucky. It was a good path for me, but if it’s the only path for people who care as much about collaboration as I do, we’re not going to have many people in our field.

For several years now, I’ve done whatever I could to make that path easier for anyone who was hungry and committed to learning, from sharing all of my templates to providing professional opportunities to promising practitioners. I’ve been able to help a lot of people simply by making time to talk with and encourage them.

However, at the end of the day, the best way to learn is to do the work, to try stuff and to fail over and over again. Before I “retired,” I was able to create safe opportunities for others to do exactly that by inviting them to work with me on real projects.

Those who shadowed me were able to see how I thought about problems and how my ideas manifested themselves in practice. They were able to experience and develop good preparation habits. They were able to practice on real problems without fear of failing, because I could act as their safety net.

Most importantly, they could watch me fail and understand that failing is simply part of the process, that we all do it, and that there is an art to doing it gracefully and successfully.

When I retired, I lost this platform. I was focused entirely on capacity-building, and while I could share stories and advice, I couldn’t show people how I approached process design and facilitation, because I wasn’t doing that work anymore.

This alone wasn’t reason enough to unretire. I know many great practitioners in this space, and I referred people to those who were willing to open up their work practices. I also devoted a lot of my own time to shadow these peers myself for my own learning.

While I learned quite a bit from shadowing, I was extremely disappointed overall by the quality of work I was seeing from some of the most well-respected people in this field. The standard for what it means to do this work well is very low, and it seems that many good practitioners are simply hopping over this bar, which they can do easily.

The problem is that simply clearing the bar does not lead to high performance. If we want to live in a world that is more alive, if we want to address the challenging, urgent problems that we all face, then we, as practitioners, need to raise the bar, not just clear it.

There were exceptions to my shadowing experiences. They tended not to be consultants, but rather people who were embedded in organizations, often younger practitioners who had skin in the game and a hunger to learn. I saw some excellent work from these practitioners, most of whom are largely invisible both in their organizations and in this larger field of collaborative practitioners.

Furthermore, even though I stopped designing and facilitating processes for hire, I actually got better at it during my retirement. I have a much greater understanding for how to integrate capacity-building into my processes, and I can design interventions that are more scalable and sustainable as a result. Also, because I’ve been doing my own workouts (as well as leading them for others), my own collaboration muscles have simply gotten stronger.

I wrote previously about how we need chefs, not recipes. In order to inspire great cooking, people need to taste great meals. I’m hungry to show what’s possible by taking on problems that are hard and meaningful. I want to raise the bar, and I want to do it in a way so that others can learn with me.

I’m still prioritizing my capacity-buiding efforts. I have more programs to offer and more things to give away. I am convinced that these are levers that have the best chance at improving our abilities to collaborate at scale.

At the same time, I’m open to taking on consulting work again. I will be extremely selective, and I will only take on one project at a time. I’ll use these projects as a way to model best practices and as a platform where other practitioners can learn with me. As it so happens, I already have a project, which I’m excited to share more about soon.

Falling Off a Tightrope: A Lesson in Resilience

My favorite exercise from my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets workout program is also the simplest and most fundamental. I call it the “One-Minute Drill.” In its simplest form, there is a speaker and a listener. The speaker spends one-minute answering a question or telling a story. He or she then takes a minute to answer the same question or to repeat the same story, refining or adding wherever he or she sees fit.

The listener listens without taking notes. When the speaker finishes, the listener reflects back what he or she heard. The speaker then grades the listener on a 1-5 scale (with 5 being the best) based on how well the listener reflected back what the speaker said. If the listener missed any nuance, no matter how subtle, the speaker is instructed not to give the listener a 5. I often have the listener repeat the exercise until he or she gets a 5.

It’s not easy. Even doing it once reveals a lot about both parties and about the nature and critical importance of listening, of synthesizing, of feeling heard, and of practice. But Muscles & Mindsets isn’t about doing exercises once. It’s about repetition, developing critical muscles, building good habits.

There are countless ways to tweak this exercise, and over the course of my program, participants experience many of these variations. It doesn’t matter how good they are at listening. At some point — usually sooner rather than later — they will fail the exercise.

Deep listening is hard enough when the circumstances are ideal. In reality, circumstances never are. Our attentions are constantly being pulled in multiple directions. Our physical, mental, and emotional states affect our ability to be present. Then there are times when we simply don’t care what the other person is saying.

The point of the exercise is not to prevent failure. It’s not even to minimize it. It’s to train ourselves to recognize it when it happens and to recover from it. You do this through practice, practice, practice.

Many of us — including me — often forget this. We focus on avoiding failure, rather than developing resilience, and we often punish ourselves when we inevitably fail.

Recently, Idelisse Malavé, a long-time advisor to the Social Transformation Project, shared a wonderful metaphor from Sharon Salzberg, a meditation teacher, and Idelisse kindly let me record her as she explained it. The work that so many of us are trying to do is fundamentally hard, like walking a tightrope. There are inevitably times when we will lose our balance and fall. If our reaction is to curse at ourselves, we will miss the many additional tightropes underneath us. Our focus should be on regaining our balance on a new tightrope so that we can start to walk again.

Photo by Josh Heald. CC BY-NC.

Celebrating a Meeting That I Had Nothing and Everything to Do With

I was in Detroit a few weeks ago for the RE-AMP Annual Meeting. I was there for reasons that were largely ancillary to the meeting itself. I’m not a member of the RE-AMP network. I wasn’t giving a talk. I didn’t participate in the design or facilitation, other than offering a thought or two when asked.

Still, my experience there felt like validation for everything I’ve been working on over the past two years. It was an incredible high, and it also demonstrated how much work still remains to achieve my larger goal of wide-scale collaborative literacy.

Success Breeds New Challenges

RE-AMP is a network of over 160 organizational members focused on climate change in the Midwest. Their shared goal is to reduce regional global warming emissions 80% by 2050.

It was co-initiated over a decade ago by my friend and former colleague, Rick Reed, who had a simple question he wanted to test:

What would happen if nonprofits and foundations alike took the time to sit down together to really, truly, deeply understand the system they were all trying to change?

So he tested it. With the backing of the Garfield Foundation, he brought together a small group of leaders in the Midwest working on climate change and convinced them to sit together, listen to each other, and strategize together.

The process took almost two years. It was messy and expensive, and it teetered on total and utter failure on multiple occasions. But it worked. Participants arrived at a shared epiphany about what the critical levers were for stopping climate change. The trust and relationships that were built and strengthened through the process led to quick and aligned action among nonprofits and foundations alike around those leverage points.

This strategic alignment resulted in many immediate wins, the most eye-opening being stopping 30 coal plants in the Midwest.

Success created new problems. The hard work of thinking and planning together had forged a collective attitude, a network mindset among the initial participants that drove the way they worked. Their success attracted new participants very quickly, but the shared understanding, the relationships, and the network mindset did not scale at the same pace.

Over the past few years, the network has made a number of moves to try to shift this. Most notably, they hired a network CEO and additional full-time “staff” members to be able to respond more quickly to the needs of the network. (RE-AMP is not its own legal entity. Its “staff” are all employed by other organizations distributed throughout the network.)

This investment in internal capacity has enabled the network to start addressing structural and bigger picture issues that had previously been left by the wayside. One of those issues has been re-integrating systems thinking and a more collaborative mindset back into the DNA of the network.

Helping Groups Help Themselves

Three years ago, I left the consulting firm I co-founded and a team that I loved in order to seek greater balance and impact. I felt that I was doing some of the best work in the field, but it was not translating into the larger-scale impact I was hoping for.

Ever since I got into this business in the early 2000s, I’ve always explained my vision of the world and theory of change with a simple thought exercise:

Think about the best collaborative experience you’ve ever had.

What would your life be like if all of your collaborative experiences were as good as that one?

What would the world be like if everyone’s collaborative experiences were all that good?

How about if everyone’s collaborative experiences were all just slightly better?

I believed (and still believe) that the world would be significantly better if we saw incremental improvement in people’s collaborative literacy across the board at scale.

However, that’s not where I focused my energy. I liked working on hugely complex problems that required cutting-edge capabilities. I did the work inclusively — the only way you had a chance to solve these kinds of problems — with the hope that people would learn enough through the experience that they could continue working in a similar way. Furthermore, I hoped that by openly sharing what I learned, I could have a broader impact than just the projects I was working on.

Both of these turned out to be true, but not appreciably so. The way I was working was benefiting me more than anyone else. It was an incredible opportunity for me to practice and learn and to do work that was joyful and meaningful, and it helped me establish a reputation that created more opportunities. Others were also learning from these experiences, but they weren’t as invested as I was, and there were few structural incentives for them to continue developing their skills after we finished the project.

If I wanted to stay true to my vision, I needed to focus on sustainable interventions for helping others develop their collaborative capabilities. I do not believe that the ability to collaborate effectively is some mystical talent with which only a select few are imbued. I believe that everyone has the ability to be much, much better. All people need are opportunities to practice.

For the past two years, I’ve been focused on creating those opportunities. I’ve been testing workouts and tools designed to help people develop stronger collaborative muscles and mindsets. I stopped doing work for groups and have focused instead on helping them develop the skills to help themselves. I’ve also been mentoring emerging practitioners who want to go the extra mile in developing their skills.

The Meeting

In some ways, RE-AMP has been an ideal testbed for my workouts and tools. Because it’s a decentralized network, it can’t change culture or practices by fiat (or by firing) the way an organization can. Practices have to work, otherwise they will be ignored, and they have to be adopted widely, otherwise they will be rendered ineffective.

Furthermore, its history of great work, strong relationships, and growing internal capacity served as a strong foundation. Its staff, along with many of the informal leaders in the network, are bold, talented, and hungry to learn.

I ran an early pilot of my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program with the RE-AMP staff last year. It went okay. Some things were well-received, some not so much. I developed an assessment to help me determine whether or not my program was working, but the main thing I learned was that my assessment needed improving.

Still, the program was effective enough that they were interested in making it available to the broader network. For the past few months, we’ve been discussing and planning a program that will launch early next month.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to me, the RE-AMP staff was cooking up something interesting on their own. They had decided to run a session at their Annual Meeting based on a Muscles & Mindsets exercise I had led them through at their staff meeting for a dozen people the previous year. They were going to adapt it for 160.

Scaling up the exercise would actually be relatively straightforward. Most exercises I design are meant to scale. Understanding this conceptually, though, and believing it enough to do it in a real-life, high-stakes situation takes courage, especially if you haven’t done it before. This is one reason why people hire people like me to do this for them.

But the RE-AMPers weren’t going to bother with that. They had the audacity to try it on their own. Prior to the meeting, they walked me through what they were going to do, and I made some suggestions and offered encouragement. Beyond that, I had nothing to do with the session.

Watching the session was exciting on many levels. First, Sarah Shanahan and Trevor Drake expertly facilitated the exercise. They had a calm energy, and they gave clear instructions with compelling, relevant examples. They managed to command a large, rowdy room of people by giving up control, which the participants appreciated and which one person made a point of noting during the debrief.

Second, it was a thrill to watch 160 people using a toolkit — our mindset cards — that I had invested a few years and a ton of energy into codesigning. At my previous consulting firm, I had done a lot of organizational culture work with my friend and business partner, Kristin Cobble, who had introduced me to a framework for mapping mindsets to behaviors. It was effective, but also high overhead, and it required facilitators who were very literate with the framework. For example, it took us four months to do this work with a 75-person organization, and that was an accelerated process!

My motivation for designing the cards was to see if we could create a tool that would allow groups to condense a multi-month conversation into a few hours and to allow them to have that conversation without the aid of a framework expert. There were several examples of groups using the cards to great success with groups of 10-15, and I was confident that larger groups could benefit from them as well. But I hadn’t seen it… until the RE-AMP meeting.

It was amazing to watch 160 deeply engaged in conversation using the cards, and it felt even better knowing that they were able to do it without my help. I walked around the room, eavesdropping on conversation, peeking at people’s cards, and soaking in the buzz. I was in heaven.

Third, I was surprised by what happened. Gail Francis, who led the design of this session, had made a decision about something relatively minor against which I had advised. The final exercise for the 20 groups of eight was to use the cards to agree on a set of mindset “spectrums.” The question was how to capture these. I had suggested that the groups write them on a worksheet, then bring them to her. She decided to have people hold up their cards, which she would then collect and transcribe for them. It was a tradeoff between saving time for the participants and saving time for the facilitators.

She understood the trade-off and chose saving the participants’ time. That led to something completely unexpected — groups cheering in excitement every time they completed the exercise. It was fun, it was funny, it bolstered the already high energy in the room, and it likely wouldn’t have happened had she chose what I had suggested.

We’re Not There Yet

I’ve devoted the last two years to developing methods and tools that help groups help themselves. Seeing this work manifest itself this way at the RE-AMP Annual Meeting was gratifying and validating. Every group already has smart, capable people who have the potential to unleash the group’s intelligence. All they need is space, a little guidance, and room to practice and learn.

For this meeting, a few people got that space, and the results were outstanding. They were also only a fraction of what’s possible. As good as they were, they could have been much, much better. They’ll get there if the people in the network are given that room to practice their skills in bigger and more ambitious ways. Unfortunately, most groups do not give people that space.

All too often, “experimenting” consists of one-offs. Mastery doesn’t happen in a one-off. It takes time and commitment and lots of stumbling. In order to raise the bar and create the space for that growth, people need to experience what’s possible. Most people have such poor collaborative experiences, they either flinch and give up at the first sign of trouble, or they stop taking risks after they experience a small win. RE-AMP is ahead of most groups in this regard, but still, I wonder.

If my workouts and tools are going to have a chance at making an impact, then I need to find ways to make it safe for people to commit to them, and I also have to give people the experience of what’s possible. I’m currently exploring ways to do exactly that. In the meantime, I’m appreciating what I’ve accomplished so far and the people who have taken me there, and I’m excited about what’s coming next.

Thanks to Greg Gentschev and H. Jessica Kim for reviewing early drafts of this post.

Correction: The originally published version of this post stated that this was the first time the RE-AMP staff had decided to design and facilitate their Annual Meeting on their own without external facilitation. Gail Francis pointed out that this was not correct. While their early meetings had been designed and facilitated externally, they had actually been designing and facilitating their meetings on their own for several years. I removed my incorrect claim in this version.

Do-It-Yourself Strategy and Culture

In 2009, I was asked by the Wikimedia Foundation to design and lead a movement-wide strategic planning process. The goal was to create a high-quality, five-year strategic plan the same way that Wikipedia was created — by creating a space where anyone in the world who cared could come and literally co-author the plan.

We had two fundamental challenges. First, it wasn’t enough to simply have a plan. It had to be a good plan that some significant percentage of the movement both understood and felt ownership over.

Second, we were asking people in the community to develop a strategy, but most people had no idea what strategy was. (This, frankly, is true of people in general, even in business.) It was different from Wikipedia in that most people already have a mental model of what an encyclopedia is. We had to be more concrete about what it was that we were asking people to do.

I explained that strategic planning, when done well, consists of collectively exploring four basic questions:

Where are we now?
Where do we want to go? Why?
How do we get there?

I further explained that we were going to create a website with these questions, we were going to get as many people as possible to explore these questions on that website, and by the end of the year, we would have our movement-wide, five-year strategic plan.

And that’s essentially what we did.

Get the right people to explore core questions together. Where are we now? Where do we want to go, and why? How do we get there? Provide the space and the support to help these people have the most effective conversation possible. Trust that something good will emerge and that those who created it will feel ownership over it.

This is how I’ve always done strategy, regardless of the size or shape of the group. It looks different every time, but the basic principles are always the same. People were intrigued by what we accomplished with Wikimedia, because it was global and primarily online, because we had gaudy results, and because Wikipedia is a sexy project. However, I was simply using the same basic approach that I use when working with small teams and even my own life.

The craft of developing strategy is figuring out how best to explore these core questions. It’s not hard to come up with answers. The challenge is coming up with good answers. To do that, you need to give the right people the opportunity and the space to struggle over these questions. That process doesn’t just result in better answers. It results in greater ownership over those answers.

Breakfast and Culture

What’s your strategy for eating breakfast in the morning?

Are you a grab-and-run person, either from your own kitchen or from a coffee shop near your office? Eating breakfast at home is cheaper than eating out, but eating out might be faster. Are you optimizing for time or money? Why?

Maybe you have kids, and you value the ritual of kicking off the day eating together? Maybe you’re a night owl, and you’d rather get an extra 30-minutes of sleep than worry about eating at all in the morning.

Where do you want to go? Why? How do you get there? These are key strategic questions, but you can’t answer them without also considering culture — your patterns of behavior, your values, your mindsets, your identity. Choosing to cook your own meals is as much a cultural decision as it is a strategic one.

In my past life as a collaboration consultant, groups would hire me to help with either strategy or culture, but never both. I realized fairly quickly that trying to separate those two processes was largely artificial, that you couldn’t explore one without inevitably colliding with the other.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He did not intend to say that one was more important than the other, but that both were necessarily intertwined. Or, as my friend, Jeff Hwang, has more accurately put it, “Saying culture eats strategy for breakfast is like saying your left foot eats your right foot for breakfast. You need both.”

As with strategy, culture work is a process of collective inquiry, except instead of focusing on action (where do you want to go?), the questions are centered around identity:

Who are we now?
Who do we want to be, and why?
How do we get there?

The key to effective culture work is to explore these questions yourself, to struggle over them together as a group, and to constantly revisit them as you try things and learn.

DIY Strategy and Culture

Toward the end of 2013, Dharmishta Rood, who was then managing Code for America’s startups program, asked me if I would mentor one of its incubator companies, which was having some challenges around communication and decision-making. I had been toying with some ideas for a do-it-yourself toolkit that would help groups develop better collaborative habits on their own, and I suggested that we start there.

We immediately ran into problems. The toolkit assumed that the group was already aligned around a core strategy, but with this group, that wasn’t the case. They had been going, going, going without stopping to step back and ask themselves what they were trying to accomplish, how they wanted to accomplish those things, and why. (This is very typical with startups.)

This group needed space to do some core work around strategy and culture. I threw out my old toolkit and created a new one designed to help groups have strategy and culture conversations continuously and productively on their own. The revised toolkit was based on the key questions underlying strategy and culture depicted as two cyclical loops:

While most strategy or culture processes are progressively staged, in practice, inquiry is never linear, nor should it be. Spending time on one question surfaces new insights into the other questions, and vice-versa. Where you start and the order in which you go are not important. What matters is that you get to all of the questions eventually and that you revisit them constantly — hence the two cycles. My colleague, Kate Wing, recently noted the resemblance of the diagram to bicycle wheels, which is why we now call it the Strategy-Culture Bicycle.

Dharmishta and I saw the Bicycle pay immediate dividends with this group. People were able to wade through the complexity and overwhelm, notice and celebrate what they had already accomplished, and identify high-priority questions that needed further discussion. Furthermore, the process was simple enough that it did not require a third-party’s assistance. They were able to do it fine on their own, and they would get better at it as they practiced.

Pleased and a bit surprised by its effectiveness, I asked my long-time colleague, Amy Wu of Duende, to partner with me on these toolkits. We prototyped another version of the toolkit with four of last year’s Code for America accelerator companies, and once again, saw great success.

We’ve gone through eight iterations together, we’ve tested the kit with over a dozen groups and individuals (for personal and professional life planning), and we’ve added some complementary components. A number of practitioners have used the toolkit on their own to help other groups, including me, Dharmishta, Amy, Kate, and Rebecca Petzel.

I’m thrilled by the potential of toolkits like these to help build the capacity of practitioners to act more strategically and to design their aspired culture. As with all of my work, these toolkits are available here and are public domain, meaning that they are freely available and that you can do anything you want with them. You can also purchase pre-printed packages.

Please use them, share them, and share your experiences! Your feedback will help us continuously improve them.

Working Less (and Other 2015 Strategic Priorities)

For over a decade, my work has fundamentally been about creating a world that is more alive. My specific focus has been on building up society’s collaborative literacy — the muscles and mindsets we need to be and work together more effectively.

Every year for the past five years, I’ve carefully mapped out a set of goals and strategies that I think will put me on the best path toward realizing my vision. In each of those years, I’ve had three priorities, and the third priority has always been something around work-life balance. In each of those years, I’ve monitored my progress and made adjustments throughout, and at the end of each year, I’ve assessed my overall progress.

Every year for the past five years, I’ve seen a similar pattern. I do well on all of my goals except for the one on work-life balance. I’ve seen incremental improvement every year, but I continue to be far from my targets.

I spent a lot of time at the end of last year reflecting on this. Was this the right goal? Did I need to reframe what I meant by work-life balance? Or did I simply need to experiment with different strategies?

I decided that it was still a critical priority for both personal and professional reasons. I believe in the importance of slowing down, that balance and pace will make me a better practitioner and a better person. I believe that we as a society need to be better at this, and I want to model this practice.

So I kept it as a goal, but I made a few changes. I reframed it slightly, and I made it my top priority.

This year, my number one strategic priority is to work less.

Working less is a clear goal. I’m confident that my metrics (which are based on hours worked and some self-care indicators) are relevant, and I’ve got specific targets, which means that I can clearly and objectively see whether or not I’m achieving this goal. If I hit my targets, I’m confident that I will be happy and healthy.

The real question is whether or not working less will make me more effective at achieving my higher-level goals. I believe it will. If I’m forced to work less, that means I’ll also have to work smarter. I’ll have to make better decisions about how I use my time, which means saying no more often than saying yes. I believe I already have the muscles to do this. Constraints will give me the incentive to use these muscles.

Three months into 2015, I’m thrilled by the results so far. I feel like I have plenty of space to think about the big-picture and also to focus and get things done. I’m seeing the people I want to see, and I’m deepening my relationships and my practice. I’ve definitely had to take things off of my task list — it’s no accident that this is my first post here this year — but the tradeoffs have been worth it, and I think my focus will pay off in big ways.

To understand what this means more concretely, it’s important to understand my other two strategic priorities for 2015. First, I’m focused on building a platform for developing collaborative literacy. Second, I’m looking to engage with 1,000 changemakers.

Building a Platform

I believe that the best way to develop collaborative literacy is through lots and lots of practice.

I’m supporting practice in two ways. First, for the past two years, I’ve been developing and prototyping workouts under the auspices of my 15-week Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program. I’m really excited about how the program has evolved, and I’m looking to document and distribute what I’ve learned more widely (and, of course, freely). I’m currently doing the program with Forward Together and some of its partners as part of a larger innovation process, and I’m looking for others who’d like to try it. (Contact me if you’re interested!)

Second, I’m trying to create the equivalent of balance bikes for changemakers. These have largely taken the form of DIY toolkits for developing strategy and culture, which I’ve been developing in partnership with Duende and many others and which will also be freely available.

I’ve been prototyping these with lots of groups over the past year, and I’m super excited by how effective they’ve been. Several practitioners have already incorporated these toolkits into their work, and demand has been high. I’m focused on continuing to refine and improve these toolkits and also documenting and distributing them in order to meet demand.

I care about chefs, not recipes, so I’ve been consciously focused on developing tools that support practice rather than writing things that are prescriptive. A number of colleagues have pushed back, suggesting that I’ve been too extreme about this. They’re right. Even though my frameworks are extremely simple, I still have them and ought to share them more proactively. I’ve written about some of them here, but they’re not easily findable. Part of the work of building a platform is weaving these frameworks together so that they’re widely accessible.

Engage with 1,000 Changemakers

Toward the end of last year, I sifted through lots of data to try to get a sense of how many people I engaged with. I came up with roughly 250. A surprising number of those were face-to-face or phone interactions, so 250 felt like a lot. But if my goal is to scale practices that will improve collaborative literacy, I need to reach a lot more than 250 people.

To some extent, creating a good platform — for example, simply documenting and publishing my aforementioned toolkits — will help expand my reach. However, simply hitting my numbers are not the point. The quality of engagement matters, which means going beyond simply making my work more accessible online.

Specifically, I’m focused on deepening my engagement with a core set of practitioners. I’ve been doing that with a small, local group of peers, which we call our “colearning group.” I’ve also been much more intentional about finding and working with emerging practitioners. All of this has helped my own practice tremendously and has also led to better toolkits.

It’s also been the best way to disseminate practices and mindsets for doing this work effectively. Every one of these practitioners are already taking what they learn out into their own communities, and a better platform will better support them in doing so. Furthermore, by modeling a culture of shadowing and mentorship, we are hopefully encouraging others to adopt similar learning practices.

This year, I hope to write less frequently, but more impactfully. I’m excited by what I’ve been doing and learning so far, and I’m looking forward to sharing more in the ensuing months.