Eugene Eric Kim

Kangaroo Court: A Tool for Constructive Feedback

2013-06-20T06:44:41Z

One of my personal challenges at Groupaya was not overwhelming my team with negative feedback. I was generally proud of the quality of my team’s work, and I think I was decent at expressing that pride in the form of positive, constructive feedback. However, I also generally had a long list of nitpicks, and I never felt the need to hold any of that back. In my mind, my positive feelings far outweighed my criticism. However, I often had difficulty communicating that.

My friend, Alex Kjerulf, is a happiness guru, and he speaks often about negativity bias. Humans are biologically more attuned to negative than to positive feedback, between three-to-five times as much. To compensate for negativity bias, you need to share positive feedback three-to-five times as often as negative.

I tried to do this, and I was sometimes even successful, but there was a deeper issue. Rebecca Petzel once said to me, “You’re the most positive person in the company, but somehow, your negative feedback stings more than anyone else’s.” My problem wasn’t necessarily quantity, it was quality.

I tried a lot of different things, and nothing seemed to work well. Out of desperation, I decided to invent a game inspired by kangaroo courts.

Kangaroo courts are essentially arbitrary forms of justice. In government, they describe a corrupt judicial system. In sports, however, they’re used as a way to enforce unwritten rules and to build team camaraderie.

A team’s veterans are usually the arbiters of justice, although the coaches sometimes play this role as well. Veteran leaders might fine their teammates for something ludicrous, such as wearing a really loud tie, but they also dole out justice for disciplinary reasons, such as showing up late to practice. Fines are often used to fund team parties.

I decided that Groupaya needed a kangaroo court. If I could attach a number to my feedback, than the magnitude of my feedback would become more clear. For nitpicks, I would dole out small fines. For major problems, I would dole out larger ones.

Given that we were not as liquid as professional athletes, I figured that an arbitrary point system would serve our purposes. Since we were using points instead of money, I figured we could actually reward people as well as penalize them. Since we had a flat, collaborative culture, I decided that anybody in the company should be able to both dole out and take away points. And if we were going to go through the effort of giving and taking points away, we might as well keep track of them.

On June 13, 2012, I created a page on our internal wiki outlining the “rules” of the game, and I announced the game on our internal microblog. I then modeled the game by docking two points from myself, one each for misspelling two people’s names in different places. (This is a huge detail pet peeve of mine, given that we’re in a relational business.)

The game lay dormant for a few days, then on June 17, 2012, I gave and took away points four additional times:

Eugene: +5 to Kristin for her June 14 addition on Charter markers to the Groupaya Way wiki. It was great information, and it showed that she’s developing an instinct for how to use wikis in-the-flow. Love it!

Eugene: -1 to Kristin for being overly motherly with Rebecca

Eugene: -1 to Rebecca for comparing me and Kristin to her parents.

Eugene: +1 to Eugene for unintentionally conceiving of a way to get people to learn how to use the wiki.

Out of the six times I delivered justice, three were “real,” and the rest were jokes. Two of the three “real” instances were me penalizing myself, and the other was me awarding points rather than taking them away.

At this point, our ops guru, Natalie Dejarlais, figured out what was going on, and contributed her own dry sense of humor:

Natalie: +1 to Rebecca for not comparing me to her parents.

Rebecca and Kristin Cobble, my Groupaya co-founder, were mystified. Rebecca, ever the competitive one, was miffed that she was down a point in a game that she hadn’t signed up for. Keep in mind, all of this was happening online. We had not seen each other or talked over the phone, so I had not had the chance to explain the game verbally.

Shortly afterward, I left town for a client, and while I was gone, Natalie explained the game to Rebecca and Kristin at coworking. They got it, both started playing, and the game took on a life of its own. Everyone played. We gave and took points away from each other and ourselves about 40 times a month.

Lots of them were silly, where we were simply goofing off and having fun with each other. Many were concrete and substantial. Unexpectedly, the vast majority of these were positive. I had designed the game to be a safe way to give negative feedback, but it had emerged as a way of celebrating each other’s successes, of tracking what we were doing well, and of lightening the overall mood.

At some point, I decided that the points winner each month should win a trophy (a Surfer Obama bobblehead doll I picked up in Hawaii along with a tiara that Natalie contributed to disincentivize me from trying to win) and that the points would reset each month. We had a monthly awards ceremony, where Natalie would blast the theme song from Rocky, and Kristin would pretend that she didn’t love Surfer Obama. (When she finally won, she confessed her true feelings.)

The game had its desired effect in terms of improving the overall learning culture in our organization, but its most important contribution was joy and humor. I often pondered writing a mobile app so that we could extend the game to our larger network, as we often found ourselves granting points to our external colleagues and clients, who never got to actually see them (or, more importantly, win Surfer Obama).

I’m strongly considering introducing some variation of the game into Changemaker Bootcamp, as I’m looking for creative ways of introducing more concrete feedback so that participants can track their progress. Amy Wu, Groupaya’s brilliant designer, recently told me that she had adapted the game for her kids to great effect. If you decide to adopt or adapt the game for your team or organization, let me know in the comments below! I’d love to hear about it!

Disrupting Organizational Consulting

2013-06-09T05:08:21Z

My secret goal with Changemaker Bootcamp is to disrupt management and organizational development (OD) consulting.

My rough and totally unscientific estimate is that the budgets for 90 percent of all management and organizational development consulting projects would be better spent on capacity development for staff.

Good consultants already orient their work toward developing this capacity, but it comes at a premium cost. When compared to other consultants who are charging similar or higher costs but are providing far less value, these costs are more than justified. However, I think there’s a huge market opportunity for something that provides greater, broader value at a fraction of the cost.

Physical fitness offers an apt analogy. If you want premium service, you can hire a personal trainer. At the opposite end of the market, you can buy a book or search the web for tips on how to stay fit. There are many services in-between as well: DVDs, bootcamps, gym memberships, and so forth.

With organizational work, there are two extremes with very little in the middle, and it’s skewed heavily (and needlessly) toward the high-end.

There’s consulting on the high-end, and there are books and articles on the low-end. Most existing training programs fall on the low-end of the spectrum as well, because they are oriented primarily around delivering information rather than on shifting behaviors.

There’s no reason why the market for organizational effectiveness should not look more like the market for physical fitness.

I think organizations in general — and, by extension, society as a whole — would be much better off if it did. I think services like Changemaker Bootcamp have the potential to shift the market in this way.

An Example: Strategic Planning

Consider strategic planning. Organizations bring in consultants to help guide the process or to provide content expertise. The vast majority of strategic planning processes focus on helping the leadership team develop the “right” strategy.

Some organizations really benefit from these processes, because they understand what strategy is, and, more importantly, they understand how to act strategically. I’ve worked with several organizations like this, where my primary role was to create the space for them to have the strategic conversation. Once they had that space, they were able to align quickly and execute effectively.

The vast majority of organizations — and people, it seems — don’t fall into this category. In these cases, hiring a consultant is a waste of money. These organizations don’t have the capacity to evaluate the end result, and they’re not likely to act on it regardless.

Unfortunately, these organizations often hire consultants anyway, and the results are predictably ugly — “strategies” consisting of long lists of goals that are too general and abstract to mean anything. Not that it matters, since no one in these organizations generally knows what those goals are anyway.

The worst part about all this is that developing a good strategy is relatively easy. Acting strategically is what’s truly hard.

Acting strategically takes practice. Good consultants can help organizations practice in the same way that personal trainers help their clients. However, most consultants do not take this approach. Even if they did, there ought to be more and better ways to support practice than consulting.

Changemaker Bootcamp’s approach is to offer a set of exercises for practicing asking generative questions. These exercises don’t require any specialized skill to do, but they can help develop specialized skills if repeated often enough with constructive feedback from others.

My hypothesis is that most organizations would benefit far more from having their staff go through exercises like these than they would from hiring expensive consultants lead them through traditional planning processes.

Figuring out How to Steer

2013-06-07T19:31:59Z

I’ve had many friends fill out and share my changemaker survey (there’s still time, so you can too), and it’s spurred some interesting discussions (which was largely the point). My friend, Joe Blaylock, shared the survey on his Facebook wall, and in the ensuing discussion, he ended up describing what I do as follows:

Institutions like governments and churches and corporations are created to get work done that individuals alone can’t achieve. Otherwise, why bother with them in the first place? There are lots of times when the quickest way to make things better isn’t to start another (tiny, powerless) organization, but to steer one of these great, ponderous ships to which you have access. If only you can find the wheel. A lot of Eugene’s work is about helping people figure out how to steer.

Trying to describe what I do to others is an ongoing challenge for me. I really love Joe’s metaphor, which feels both accurate and clear. Thanks, Joe!

In Defense of Hierarchy

2013-06-06T19:06:04Z

Alpha Lo, one of the editors of The Open Collaboration Encyclopedia, writes an excellent blog about “open collaboration.” I mostly liked his latest post, where he tries to define “open collaboration,” but I strongly disagreed with one particularly prominent premise. It’s something I see repeated over and over again, often by people I respect, and it bothers me everytime I see it.

He says that open collaboration is not hierarchical.

This is both wrong and problematic. All forms of high-performance collaboration (open or not) are hierarchical. What differentiates open collaboration is that it’s not rigidly hierarchical.

Why the distinction? Because hierarchy is in fact a good thing. Everyone should not be equal in every context. Part of effective collaboration is about empowering people to do the things that they can do most effectively.

Hierarchical structures are a shortcut for doing this. We try to assign positions of formal power to people who are generally best suited to make good decisions. However, these choices will not be correct in all (or sometimes in any) contexts. In those cases, the challenge is finding ways to skillfully navigate these structures or to adapt them accordingly. The military is a great example of a system that tries to account for this flaw. It’s a rigidly hierarchical system that promotes people who know when and how to work around the system.

A network frame is not about getting rid of hierarchy. It’s about allowing the best form of hierarchy to emerge. It’s not only incorrect to frame it as being opposed to hierarchy, it’s problematic. Instead of worrying about hierarchy, we should be looking out for rigid structures, both explicit and implicit. The implicit structures are often the more problematic ones.

Some of these implicit structures stem from basic human dynamics. For example, there have been many studies showing that we tend to give agency to people who talk a lot, regardless of what it is that they’re saying. A system that does not acknowledge and attempt to counter this will run into the same problems that any traditionally hierarchical system has, even if it’s more “open” on the surface.

Wikipedia is a great example of this, as are most communities that use traditional online forums. Town hall meetings are a great face-to-face example of this. People are able to acquire implicit power in these communities simply by out-talking everyone else. Tools like Quora try to counter this by not unintentionally rewarding people who talk more than others. And, in imposing alternative structures, these tools introduce new problems.

This is where the rest of Alpha’s post resonates strongly with me. In describing how to build an open collaboration project, he talks about more participatory structures, prototyping and open feedback loops, diversity and empathy. These are all strategies that counter rigidity and that encourage the right kinds of hierarchy to emerge in the right moments.

May Progress Report on Balance and Impact

2013-05-29T22:56:08Z

“I think I’m probably going to end up like a Tex Winter at some point. Maybe like a Pete Newell. Pete was on the sidelines for a number of teams for maybe the last 15-20 years of his life where he just encouraged people how to play. He sat with Lenny Wilkens in Cleveland for a number of years. He was a helpful consultant. That might be what I’m left to do — be a mentor of some sort.”

—Phil Jackson, 67-year old basketball
coaching legend on his basketball future

The end of May has arrived, month five of my self-imposed and hopefully temporary retirement. As I noted a few weeks ago, I have some clarity on some professional goals and even some ideas about how to achieve them. As expected, this whole process has been both exciting and scary. It’s also sometimes depressing. When you put your heart and soul and sweat and tears into something for ten years, it becomes a huge part of who you are. Unraveling that feels like therapy, in both good and bad ways.

Earlier today, I read the above quote from Phil Jackson, and I found it a huge downer. That guy won 11 rings. I know he’s 67 with bad hips and a bad back and that he doesn’t want to do the coaching grind anymore, but there are undoubtedly better ways for him to be contributing to the game right now. What’s worse is that I kind of see myself in his words right now, even though I’m 30 years younger and nowhere near as accomplished.

I still get consulting inquiries, all of which I’ve turned down so far. It’s nice to know that people still respect you. It’s even nicer that Groupaya is still around and that Rebecca Petzel is still working as a consultant, as I can point people to either of them and feel good about the referral.

But I find a lot of that hard as well. It’s hard to turn down great projects, especially when your bank account is going in the wrong direction. Chatting with people about this stuff gets the intellectual juices flowing. Then the ego kicks in, as I imagine what I’d do if I took on those projects.

When I inevitably refer the work to my peers, I’m sometimes deflated by what I imagine will not happen because I’m not taking on the work. A lot of that is pure ego, silly and wrong. Some of it is not. Either way, it can be hard to let go.

Sometimes, I see work happening in less-than-skillful ways, and I get angry and feel myself wanting to fall back into comfortable roles and patterns. “Hire me as a consultant, and I’ll show you how it’s done!” I think to myself. Maybe I’m right. However, if I’m honest with myself about what it means to make a true impact while maintaining my health and sanity, I remember why I’m trying to break out of that very mindset.

Earlier this month, I attended the wonderful Creating Space conference in Baltimore, where Esther Nieves shared her motto: “Slow the pace, stay in the race.” I try to remind myself of this constantly, and when I’m actually practicing it, I can see it working. I’m thinking about things in a methodical way, and I’m liking how that process is going and how balanced my life is feeling while I’m doing that. I’m talking to a lot of people, listening deeply, trying to challenge my own assumptions about what needs to happen in the world. I’m doing experiments systematically, and I’m learning a lot that way.

Still, it’s hard. It does not come naturally for me to go slow, even when I’m actually and literally running. I occasionally go on long runs with my sister, who is constantly encouraging me to slow down so that I can run longer. I just can’t do it. I get bored. I’ll end up stopping after five miles, completely gassed, and she’ll keep running another three or four miles.

When I’m not using all of my skills, I feel underutilized and unhappy. I just have to keep reminding myself that I’m going slowly right now so that I can figure out ways to apply all of my skills in a more strategic, impactful, and joyful way.

Which brings me back to Phil Jackson and the world of sports. Earlier this year, as I went through a process of personal visioning, I put together a list of role models. One of those people was Jon Gruden, the youngest coach ever to win a Super Bowl at 41. He’s been out of coaching for the past four years, to the constant surprise of many pundits, given that he’s still young and in-demand and that he’s a self-proclaimed football junkie who has never had (nor wanted) a life outside of football. What I love about Gruden is that he’s found outside-the-box and probably even more impactful ways to stay close to the game.

I know what I’m passionate about, and I know what kind of life I want to live. I’m in that outside-the-box mode right now, which is occasionally a struggle, but which has been great overall. I think good things are going to come out of this whole process, although I am impatient to figure out what those things will be. I’ll just have to keep reminding myself: Slow the pace, stay in the race….

Social Artistry

2013-05-15T16:35:19Z

Last week, my friend, Elissa Perry, a poet and a leadership consultant, asked me how my recent foray into “creative processes” was affecting how I thought about my work. She was referring specifically to my photography dabblings, but I was confused at first. I didn’t understand her distinction between “creative processes” and “my work,” because I always thought those two things were one and the same.

Both my sisters are “artists” in the more traditional sense. My older sister is a violinist married to a composer. My younger sister got her MFA in creative writing, although she is now a practicing lawyer. While their mediums of choice are different from mine, I don’t see my work as being substantially different from theirs.

I was in the business of designing experiences that facilitated high-performance collaboration. I used the same creative muscles that my sisters did to do their work, and I got to express myself in the process. My work stimulated me intellectually from solving a problem and emotionally from being creative. Like all art, the process of creation was sometimes a frustrating grind, but it was overall a wonderful, joyful experience. I’m feeling it right now as I design the next iteration of Changemaker Bootcamp.

A few years ago, I came across the term, “social artist,” from Nancy White to describe this kind of work. I haven’t quite adopted it for myself, but I think it’s an apt description.

As for Elissa’s original question, here are some recent musings about how my photography has affected my other creative processes:

And this is a great excuse to share some of Elissa’s artistry. At last week’s wonderful Creating Space X conference, the notions of “bridging” came up several times, so Elissa treated us to a poem that she wrote that was inspired by the new Bay Bridge. It’s part of a collection entitled, “Everything Indicates.”

Survey on Changemaker Challenges

2013-05-13T15:48:41Z

When I left Groupaya at the end of last year, I promised myself that I would take four months before I started thinking too seriously about what I was going to do next. Well, those four months have passed! I’ve loved my life these past few months, and it’s helped me get more clear about what I want to do next.

I want to help people who are trying to make change in the world. In particular, I want to boost the literacy for doing collaborative work, which is a critical capacity for changemakers and which is sorely lacking on a grand scale. I want to do it in a way that is experiential, high-touch, and scalable. (Yes, I realize that “high touch” and “scaleable” sound contradictory. I don’t think they have to be.)

I’ve been framing my goal as wanting to create balance bikes for changemakers. I’ve been experimenting with an idea I’m calling Changemaker Bootcamp, and I have some other ideas I want to play with as well.

What I want to do now is to get more intentional about talking to other changemakers, finding out what’s helped and prevented them from doing their work effectively. As a starting point for this, I’ve created a brief survey.

If you’re someone who’s trying to make change in the world, please take five minutes to fill out the survey and share it widely with others.

I’ll be sure to share what I learn here. And I’m looking forward to talking to many of you!

Beginner’s Mind and the Pace of Learning

2013-04-25T19:02:27Z

Earlier this week, I was watching videos of some of Groupaya’s strategy meetings last year. I was looking for video clips of interesting group dynamics that I could share at Changemaker Bootcamp, but I found myself instead reliving some challenging moments from last year.

Rebecca had set the tone of that meeting by having us celebrate our highlights. This was a good thing, because I spent most of the rest of the meeting talking about what I thought we were doing wrong.

In the midst of my meeting-long, blistering critique, I emerged from my agitation to express a momentary, but authentic feeling of self-compassion and perspective. I said, “I’m not actually unhappy about where we are right now. I think we’ve accomplished some amazing things. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is marathon, not a sprint. If we have to adjust some of our expectations accordingly, then let’s do it.”

Kristin let out a visceral sigh in reaction to this, so much so that I was taken aback at first. “Thank you for saying that,” she said when I looked at her questioningly. “That is so true.”

As it turns out, she had been carrying the same weight that I had, already heavy from her own expectations and exacerbated by what I was adding. “When you run a marathon, you take water from the water station, and you take a moment to replenish yourself,” she said. “You can’t finish otherwise. When you sprint, you don’t have time for that, but you don’t need it either.”

Starting Groupaya made me a much better consultant, largely because of moments like these. It’s easy to say stuff like this to others, but it’s incredibly hard to do in practice. When you are a doer who feels urgency — self-imposed or otherwise — you pressure yourself to go, go, go. Sometimes it’s merited, often it’s not. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to maintain a sense of perspective, to manage your expectations accordingly, to push yourself without killing yourself, and to take the moments you need to replenish.

Now, I find myself at an interesting confluence where I’m needing to take these lessons to heart and where I’m relearning them all over again.

My one leftover project from Groupaya has been helping the Hawaii Community Foundation with a culture change process. I often complain about how foundations don’t move fast enough, and so I find myself in an unusual position of constantly reminding the great folks there to slow down. It’s been a new challenge for me to think about designing water stations as part of my process, giving my client a chance to replenish while reminding them that there’s 20 miles still to go.

Similarly, Changemaker Bootcamp has been a revelation for me. It’s really helped me understand what I know that is valuable, and what I’d like to help others learn. Figuring out how to stage that has been a huge challenge.

What’s unexpectedly helped me throughout all of this has been my photography class. Our teacher, Lauren Crew, runs a very loose class, focusing on immersion and discussion. I love to learn this way. It plays to a lot of my strengths, but it can easily get overwhelming. Every assignment feels like a huge stretch, and you become viscerally aware of what you don’t know and what you can’t do.

Despite everything I know about learning and pacing, despite the confidence I have in my ability to learn, and despite the joy I get from being immersed in a learning process, I have felt a lot of doubt and self-consciousness throughout this whole process (and it’s only been two weeks). What the heck?! I’m a beginner taking an extension school class with a bunch of other incredibly nice beginners with a great, supportive teacher. Why am I getting frustrated at not taking Pulitzer Prize-caliber photos every time I click on the shutter?

Our assignment this past week was about fear. Lauren has encouraged us to start each assignment by being literal, but because of my outsized expectations, I’ve had a lot of difficulty doing that. It’s required a lot of discipline to stop conceptualizing and to start shooting, to recognize that being iterative will work much better than obsessing about perfection on the first try.

I wanted to capture my fear of being placed in a box, of being artificially labelled and constrained. (This explains a lot about my career choices.) A visual that came to mind was the fountain in front of the Embarcadero Center, which consists of lots of boxy tunnels contorting in all sorts of directions. I had wanted to recruit a friend to be a model, but my limited schedule was going to make that very difficult. Besides, it made more sense for me to be in the picture, since this was about my fear, so I decided to do a self-portrait.

I shot for about 20 minutes, and I felt anxious the entire time. I had wanted to come on a foggy morning, but the best opportunity I had was in the middle of the afternoon when the light can be challenging. There were waterfalls everywhere, which limited where I could place my GorillaPod and compose my shot.

The absolute worst part of that whole experience was being my own model. I wasn’t just posing for a cheesy headshot. I was contorting my body in ways that are not flattering, and I was doing it repeatedly, since I had to check the shot and set it up anew each time. To make matters worse, there were several people there taking photos of the fountain, and it seemed like every one of them stopped what they were doing to stare at me.

I’ve been intentionally learning in public, posting my photos on Flickr for all to see. I got a shot that was fine for classroom purposes, but I felt incredibly self-conscious about sharing this particular one publicly, something that hasn’t generally been an issue for me. Part of it was that I didn’t feel like I had successfully executed my vision, but the bigger part was simply not like to see myself in this picture.

Still, I forced myself to push through the discomfort and share. On Facebook, my friends (as usual) expressed support, but my friend, Justin, also asked me to go into more detail about what I was unhappy about. In response to my critique, he decided to play with the image on his own to see if he could get it closer to my original vision.

My original picture is on the left, Justin’s version is on the right. You can see how he manipulated the photo to create a much greater sense of being boxed in while also drawing out the details in my face. He also shared the exact Lightroom settings he used, so that I could replicate his changes and build on them.

Despite all my anxiety, here’s what I loved about this whole ordeal:

I loved the feeling of making progress, to know that I’m getting better. To even be at the point where I have a vision for a photograph is huge progress. Furthermore, I understood how to manipulate my camera in ways that I didn’t even a few months ago.
I loved the feeling of challenging myself, of living in my discomfort. This process of stretching myself and of being uncomfortable is what’s going to make me better.
I loved how learning in public brought much needed support, but more importantly, new insights and a better product. Ward Cunningham often describes the essence of wikis as putting something out there and coming back to it later and discovering that someone has made it better. This experience is not just limited to wikis, and if you’ve ever experienced this firsthand, you know how wonderful and addictive it is.

Learning can be a joyful process, but it can also be a brutal one. My photography class has reminded me of both of these things, and it’s made me much more conscious about how better to support learning, both for others and for myself.

Photo (top) by Dominik Golenia. CC BY-ND 2.0.

Changemaker Bootcamp: An Experiment in Practice and Mentorship

2013-04-15T13:25:30Z

Starting today, I will be embarking on a new experiment, which I’m calling, “Changemaker Bootcamp.” I’ll be creating a space for changemakers in organizations to:

Get clear about the kinds of shifts they’d like to see in their groups (be they their own organizations or broader)
Get clear about how to facilitate those shifts
Practice the skills necessary to facilitate those shifts

I have two wonderful ~~guinea pigs~~ co-learners, who responded to a quiet call on this blog last month and who will be embarking on this journey with me. (I’ll be saying more about them later, and they’ll be saying plenty about themselves and their projects on a group blog.) We’ll meet for 90 minutes once a week for the next four weeks, at which point we’ll all reflect on what we’ve learned, and we’ll figure out what happens next.

Why Am I Doing This?

The Brief Summary:

I am passionate about figuring out ways to boost the world’s collaborative literacy, which will result in a world that is more alive.
The biggest barrier to changemakers developing these skills are finding productive opportunities to practice them.
I’ve had the unique opportunity to learn and practice these skills for the past 10 years. I’d like to create similar opportunities for others who are similarly motivated.
I am anxious to explore ways to create “balance bikes” for changemakers — structures that help changemakers learn these critical group skills. This bootcamp is a first experiment in this.
I love this stuff, and I’m excited to try something new, challenging, and potentially impactful.

The Longer Summary: I devoted the past 10 years to practicing skills for helping groups work more skillfully together. I had to carve out my own path, and while it was meaningful and gratifying, it was also painful and arduous. While I was tremendously motivated (some might say obsessed) and worked hard, I was also very lucky. I had amazing mentors, peers, and partners, people who believed in me, encouraged me, offered me amazing opportunities to try stuff and to learn (despite lots of stumbling), and provided me with critical feedback.

I want to give back, but I want to give back bigger than I got. I want to leverage what I’ve learned over the years, my wonderful network of friends and colleagues, and whatever reputation I might have in this space to give other changemakers safe opportunities to practice, stumble, and learn.

When I left Groupaya at the end of last year, I thought the best way to share what I learned would be through writing. I’ve changed my mind. I have some good stories and I might have a unique spin on how I articulate what I’ve learned, but I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been written a thousand times already. There are already lots of books and articles on collaboration, collective intelligence, learning, openness, participatory processes, and facilitating change. Lots of them are decent, some of them are very good, and some are even extraordinary.

What’s missing are safe opportunities to practice these critical skills. My friend, Jon Stahl, wrote a provocative blog post about social change movements two years ago, where he summed up the problem as follows:

Social change work is hard, long-term work.

Like most hard work, it takes a lot of practice to get really good at it. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers claims that it takes about 10,000 hours (10 years) of practice to really master something. I don’t see why social change organizing/campaigning should really be any different.

People who have the skills to be outstanding social change activists have lots of choices and opportunities in their professional life — they have the leadership, analysis and “getting things done” skills to be valuable in many fields.

So, given these realities, are social change movements structuring themselves to attract highly skilled potential superstars and to retain them for the 10 years it takes to attain mastery… and beyond, into the most highly productive years that follow?

Creating opportunities for others to practice skills for effective changemaking will be far more impactful (and frankly, far more enjoyable) than writing a book.

What Will I Be Doing?

“Bootcamp” isn’t simply a marketing term. I’m loosely modeling this after fitness bootcamps, with an emphasis on building core strength, creating good habits, and doing rather than discussing. This will not be a “training” in a traditional corporate sense, as my emphasis will not be on delivering content, but on learning through practice.

I had lots of interesting conversations as a result of my call for co-learners, but I decided to focus on San Francisco-based changemakers embedded in organizations who had specific projects on which were embarking.

I limited it to San Francisco to keep this first experiment simple.

I’m focusing on changemakers embedded in organizations and who are not formally leading their organizations because I think that’s where the biggest opportunity for impact is. It is the opposite strategy of when I was a consultant, where we only took on projects that were sponsored by C-level leaders. We did this because we felt it would give our projects the greatest chance to create sustainable change and, frankly, because C-level leaders were generally the only people with budgets big enough to afford us. That was good for business, but it also increased the chances for impact, because it meant the organization had more skin in the game. It was the right strategy as a consultant, but it’s not the most impactful strategy from a systems perspective.

I also favored changemakers who had specific projects in order to keep the work grounded. I think the skills they develop will be applicable to everything they do, but I want to have specific goals in mind to create a sense of urgency as well as to tie this development process to their everyday work needs.

I will be doing the same exercises as my participants, since I myself am a changemaker based in San Francisco, and I have a specific project (this one) that I’m working on. We will all be working transparently, blogging about what we do and what we learn, because working transparently is a critical changemaker skill, something that we all need to practice.

I’ll also be sharing all of my “workout plans,” along with the metrics I plan on using to track my progress. I would be thrilled if others “stole” the idea and the plans, because we need a lot more people doing this kind of thing, experimenting with ways to do it more effectively, and sharing what they learn so that we can all benefit from it.

What Do I Hope to Learn?

Is this a model that helps changemakers learn the skills they need to be learning?
What are the actual and potential impacts of such a process?
How can I tweak the model to make it even more impactful?
How can I get better at implementing the model?
Is this a service that changemakers want?
Is there an opportunity to build a business around this?
Is this something I enjoy doing?

How Do I Follow This Crazy Experiment?

We’ll all be sharing our experiences on a group blog, where I’ll also be sharing annotated “workout plans.” I’ll also likely be writing some stuff here on this blog.

If you’re interested in following along and perhaps even participating in future experiments, please subscribe to my mailing list by filling out and submitting the following form:

“Balance Bikes” for Changemakers

2013-04-09T15:40:46Z

How do you make it safe to learn?

A few months ago, I was chatting with a friend who races dirt bikes, and he was talking about the challenge of picking up the sport when you’re an adult. The problem? The bigger you are, the harder you fall. Because falling is riskier as an adult than as a kid, it’s harder to learn the intricate nuances of balance. If you don’t practice falling, you will never be effective.

Then he added, “You’ve heard of balance bikes, right?”

I had not. I — like many of my peers — learned to ride a bike with training wheels. It was a harrowing experience. I would spend a few days happily riding around with training wheels, and then my Dad would say, “Ready to try without?” And I would always say no. I had zero confidence that I could ride without them. Somehow, my Dad always managed to get me to try, and more often than not, the experiment would end quickly.

As it turns out, training wheels do the opposite of what they are supposed to do, which is to train kids to ride bikes. In order to learn how to ride a bike, you need to learn balance. Training wheels actually discourage you from learning balance.

Balance bikes are bikes without pedals. Kids sit on the bike and push themselves forward with their feet. When they want to stop, they put their feet down. Balance bikes provide the same security from falling as training wheels, but they help you to learn balance in the process.

For the past few years, it’s been hip to tout failure in the social sector. It’s well-intentioned, but it’s tremendously shallow, largely manifesting itself in big talk and ill-conceived failure contests. Failure competitions are the training wheels of changemaking. They don’t make it any safer to take thoughtful risks, and they don’t create a real path for learning how to make change meaningfully.

What’s missing from the social sector right now are balance bikes — structures that support learning the right things by lowering the cost of falling and by encouraging practice.

What are examples of balance bikes for changemakers?

I think one example is practice-oriented mentorship. Most professional cooks learn their craft through staging, where they’ll work for free on their off days in another chef’s kitchen. They’re not simply shadowing other cooks. They’re doing real work with peers and mentors. This is not just a well-understood concept among cooking circles. It’s prevalent practice.

The closest thing to this in the social sector are incubators and accelerators, both of which I think are fantastic. However, I think there’s room for something less formal and more incremental, something that looks and feels more like staging.

What do you think are potential balance bikes for changemakers? Please share your ideas in the comments below!

Photo by Kate McCarthy. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.