2013 Progress Report on Balance and Impact

I went on a five-mile run last week with my little sister. She considers five miles a “short” run. I consider it long, but that’s not what made our little excursion remarkable.

What made it remarkable was that this run came at the end of the year. I even felt pretty good afterward. I’ve been in better shape, and I’ve run longer distances, but never in December. I’m usually exhausted due to stress and out-of-shape due to inactivity. I’m ending this year feeling strong, healthy, and rested.

This was a transition year for me. I wanted to take the time to reset and reflect. I wanted to rethink what I wanted to accomplish over the next few years. I also wanted to re-engineer my life, rediscovering balance that I hold near and dear.

It’s been hard, and it’s been gratifying. It started by unpacking and letting go of many things, giving myself a chance to mourn, to celebrate, and to heal. I had to create lots of space for something new to emerge, and I had to relearn and relive the ups and downs of that creation process.

None of this would have been possible without the support and encouragement of many, many friends. Maybe there are people out there who are stronger or grittier than me, but there is no way that I could have gotten through this past year without the people in my life. I am beyond thankful for this, and I feel very, very blessed.

I don’t feel like this transition process is done, but I do feel like I’m entering a new stage, and I’m excited about what lies ahead. For the first time since 2006, I am entering the new year with professional certainty. I know what I’ll be working on, and I know where most of my income will be coming from.

For the first time since 1999, my life is also feeling spacious. I feel like I have room to explore and to let things emerge, and I’m excited for those things to happen.

If 2013 was about resting, then 2014 is about testing. Was I successful in creating new, healthy habits? Will I be successful in letting go of old, toxic ones? Will I be successful both in maintaining balance, but also in having greater impact?

We shall see. Slow the pace, stay in the race. Happy New Year!

My Top Blog Posts in 2013

Here are my top 10 blog posts from 2013 (unique visits in parentheses, bolded items explained below):

  1. Aaron Swartz (3,105)
  2. Tom Bihn Bags for Micro Four Thirds Cameras (1,732)
  3. Seeking Google Alerts Replacement (699)
  4. Balance, Impact, and Next Steps (333)
  5. Three Simple Hacks for Making Delightful Virtual Spaces (300)
  6. Survey on Changemaker Challenges (255)
  7. Five Tips for Facilitating Power Dynamics (235)
  8. WikiWednesday in San Francisco: State of the Wiki Ecosystem (199)
  9. Balance Bikes for Changemakers (199)
  10. Lessons on Mentors and Mentorship (158)

I found this breakdown curious, and it speaks to why I started my new website, Faster Than 20. The purpose of this blog is not to build an audience. It’s a place to record my thoughts. If others find my posts useful, great. If my posts catalyze interesting interactions and lead to new connections and learning, even better.

My site statistics reflect my lack of intentionality as well as the vagaries of attention on the Internet. The top post by far was a memory I shared about Aaron Swartz, someone I barely knew. Obviously, his suicide was big news, and rightfully so. But my tribute to Doug Engelbart — someone whom I knew well and who was more famous than Aaron — didn’t even crack my top 25 most visited posts. (It was 27.)

My second most visited post was about camera bags. I’ve written over 650 posts, and none of them have been even remotely similar to that piece. Why the popularity? Mostly because it was reshared by Tom Bihn, the manufacturer I mentioned in the post, but also because there’s not a lot of good information on the Internet about bags for micro-four-thirds cameras, which was why I wrote the post in the first place. From that perspective, I’m glad that it’s been a popular post.

On the other hand, I’m a little disappointed that the knowledge nuggets I shared about collaboration (by rough count, about 75 percent of my posts this past year) were not more prominently represented in the top 10. (The ones that were are bolded.) I think that several have been useful and important, but they have not been widely accessed. This could either mean that I’m overstating their importance in my head, or that I haven’t been intentional enough about building the audience.

Both are probably true, which is why I started Faster Than 20. I’m happy about keeping this space as is, but I want more people to read what I have to share about collaboration. It will be interesting to see how much of a difference intention makes next year.

2013 Self-Care Review

Here are my self-care “results” from 2013. Quick review:

  • My self-care dashboard is a way of tracking personal practices to keep me healthy, high-performing, and sane.
  • Practices tracked: Playing basketball, working out (other than basketball, including one-hour or longer walks), taking non-weekend play days, not checking work email after weeknight dinners, not checking work email on weekends.
  • Everytime I do one of the above, I get a point. I total up my points once a week. There is a theoretical maximum of 25 weekly points, but that’s completely unrealistic. My “ideal” steady state is 10 points per week.

I started tracking in 2012 and found that my four-week rolling average was the best way of tracking my current state of self-care. For example, if I did most of my practices regularly for three weeks, then had a week where I only did one or two, my four-week rolling average would still be relatively high. Conversely, if I had several bad weeks in a row, then had one week where I hit my “ideal” number of 10, I’d still have a relatively low four-week rolling average.

Here are my 2013 rolling averages (in blue) as compared to 2012:

Self-Care Rolling Average 2012-2013

Quick analysis:

  • Overall, I did a much better job of taking care of myself in 2013 than in 2012. My rolling average never hit zero in 2013, and it hit 9 at its peak — double my peak in 2012.
  • My numbers were up in all five categories this year except for working out, which saw a slight downturn. However, I played twice as much basketball this year than last, and I’m in far better shape right now than I was a year ago.
  • The biggest increases were due to me turning off work email. From April through August, I wasn’t working in the traditional sense, which explains the huge improvement. In August, I “officially” launched Changemaker Bootcamp. Later in the month, I started a project with the Garfield Foundation. My rolling average actually dipped below 2012 levels in that time period, again largely due to email. In October, I recognized the trend and adjusted, which led to my numbers going back up to peak 2012 levels, but not to peak 2013 levels.
  • The graphs are cyclical in both 2012 and 2013, and there seem to be some peaks and valleys in common. Some of it is coincidental. In April and May of both 2012 and 2013, I traveled quite a bit — for work in 2012 (where the dip was more unpleasant), for play in 2013 (where the dip was largely incidental).
  • I think my line will always be cyclical, given my personality and lifestyle. I’m good with that. However, I’d like a smaller amplitude, and I’d like the overall average to be closer to 10 than it is right now.

Bottom line: I took much better care of myself this year than last, but I have a ways to go before I hit the right balance. 2014 will be a good test as to whether I’m making systemic improvements, or whether my gains this year were more a reflection of me taking a break. I feel good about it being the former, but we’ll see. Either way, I’m happy about how 2013 went.

You can learn more about how I do my tracking at Faster Than 20. If you’re using my spreadsheet for your own tracking, please let me know how it’s going! If you’d like help getting setup, drop me an email or leave a comment below.

Five Lessons on the Craft of Collaboration from Photography

As a collaboration practitioner exploring a new path, the best thing I did this past year was to take up photography. That’s right, photography. I did it because I wanted to do something creative that had nothing to do with my professional life. Not only did it bring me tremendous joy, it unexpectedly made me better at my professional craft. When I left Groupaya one year ago, I felt like I was at the top of my game. I didn’t do any work this past year that resembled any of my work the previous ten. Yet somehow, my skills are significantly better now than they were a year ago.

Rest, reflection, and new directions clearly had something to do with that, but photography took my game to the next level. It reminded me of the importance of craft and what it feels like to be at the earliest stages of one’s learning journey. It got my creative juices flowing, which had ramifications in everything that I did.

Earlier this year, I shared eight lessons I learned about facilitation from photography. Now, I want to share five things I learned about the craft of collaboration from photography.

1. Framing is everything.

In March, I went on a photo walk with my friend, Eugene Chan. I marveled at how he saw and captured things that I completely missed, even though we were in the same place. It was all there in front of me. I was just looking at different things.

At the end of the day, photography is about drawing a tiny rectangle around something you see. Good photographers understand what elements make up good pictures (e.g. light, lines, textures, colors). They gravitate toward those elements, but there are still infinite possible ways to look at the same darn thing.

So much of the craft of collaboration is about getting people to understand each other’s frame, then finding a collective frame that works. It starts with honest-to-goodness listening, something that we so often pay lip service to, but rarely actually do, much less do well.

It continues by exploring the “right” questions together. So often, the “right” first questions are, “What are you trying to accomplish, and why?” It’s amazing how catalytic these questions can be, and yet how often people forget to ask them to each other or even themselves.

(It’s no coincidence that the practices of listening and asking generative questions are at the heart of Changemaker Bootcamp.)

2. Craft takes work.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway this year was how much work goes into getting a good shot. In April, I took my very first photography course from Lauren Crew, who is an absolute superstar. One of our assignments was to photograph fear.

If I could have taken a self-portrait upon hearing this assignment, my work would have been done. I was intimidated and stumped. However, rather than succumb to paralysis, I decided to just do the work, with great guidance from Lauren and lots of inspiration from my classmates. I journaled, and I riffed. I came up with silly concepts, and I went with them to see where they would lead me.

Every step that I took led to new insights and ideas. Even when I finally had concepts that I liked, the final product often ended up being very different from the original concept. The above photograph was probably my simplest and best from the class, but it was the product of several hours of playing, reflecting, and refining.

Craft is a process. So much of collaborating effectively seems improvisational, but people forget that you get good at improvising through practice. Practice is an exercise in frustration, little victories, and lots of patience.

Toward the end of my tenure as a collaboration consultant, I started forgetting this. I was expecting outcomes — both from myself and others — without being realistic about the process. Ironically, my reputation was built on helping clients avoid this exact trap. The world is rife with magical thinking about collaboration. “Add just the right amount of pixie dust, and voila, you have a high-performance team!” That’s not how it works. Collaborating effectively takes work, and it’s not always pretty in process. You have to expect and design for this if you want to be successful.

How do you do that? First, set goals that are realistic. With my photography, I’ve stopped expecting that, with “just one more month of practice,” I’ll be shooting like Gary Winogrand. Instead, I’m setting targets that I can actually achieve in timespans that are realistic.

Similarly, with my collaboration practices, I’ve always placed a huge emphasis on getting clear on goals. This past year, I’ve shifted the way I set goals to defining a spectrum, and I gut check these by exploring failure scenarios. These are all things I’ve done in the past, but I’ve systematized these practices so that they’ve become habits.

3. Seek feedback.

This past August, Lauren had a showing, and I took a few friends to go see it. At the show, I asked my friends, “Which pictures do you like? Why?” Neither of my friends are photography enthusiasts, but both of them shared great insights. We didn’t always agree, but it all helped me get clearer about what worked and why. Most of all, it was just fun. As we were leaving, one of my friends exclaimed, “I’ve never really talked about photography this way before. I like it!”

That conversation was like a mini-version of Lauren’s class, where we would spend three hours (often longer) giving each other feedback. Lauren’s class was simply a manifestation of what photographers all around the world do. Seeking feedback is the cultural norm, not the exception, and there are structures in place to support and reinforce that culture.

This is almost universally true with mature crafts. Writers have writers’ workshops. Musicians have master classes. Collaboration practitioners have… what?

It’s incredible to me how rare real, honest-to-goodness feedback is in business. It’s not part of our broader culture, and the only thing that resembles a structure that supports this is the annual review, which is primitive structure at best. If we truly value improvement, we need those structures so that we may start shifting our field’s culture. This was a huge part of my motivation in starting Changemaker Bootcamp.

4. Track your progress.

In team settings, I’ve always been good at establishing a culture of feedback. I’ve been less good at tracking progress. If you’re not doing both, then the cycle of feedback can feel like a hamster wheel or, worse, a wheel of negativity.

The beauty of being a beginner at something is that progress feels more tangible. I can point to a long list of things I do with my camera now that I wasn’t doing a year or even three months ago. The beauty of photography in particular is that your pictures serve as a way of tracking your progress. By simply reviewing my pictures over the past year, I can see the progress I’ve made in a very visceral way.

In order to capture the picture above, I used a telephoto lens rather than a wide angle in order to compress the background and get that beautiful layered effect. I increased my shutter speed in order to get more contrast and highlight the sun’s rays. Perhaps the most skillful decision I made was to focus on this particular tiny rectangle of a much larger, equally breathtaking view. I made all of these decisions in a matter of seconds. I would not have been able to do that a year ago.

There are two components to tracking your progress successfully. The first is simply taking the time for reflection. Most people skip this step to their detriment. The second is to come up with good indicators. This is really hard, especially when it comes to something as broad and as soft as collaboration, but it’s necessary if you truly want to improve.

I find that many high achievers are incredibly hard on themselves. I don’t mind this. High standards make for better work. The flip side of that is that you also have to be honest with yourself about acknowledging progress and success as well. I’m not talking about self-compassion here, although I believe in that also. I’m talking about self-honesty. Without tracking, it can feel like you’re never making any progress, when the truth might be the exact opposite.

5. Enjoy the ride!

I’ve been practicing all of these things in both my photography and my work. I recognize the importance of framing. I’ve acknowledged the work that’s required for my respective crafts, and I’ve established realistic expectations and goals. I constantly seek feedback, and I’m tracking my progress. I’m doing all of these things, and yet I still sometimes feel impatient or frustrated. If I’m not careful, I risk falling into a cycle of negativity.

Photography provides this wonderful safety net. The very act of capturing a moment is truly magical and delightful. Looking at my pictures from this past year always brings a smile to my face. I’m so fortunate to have experienced so much beauty and so many wonderful moments with people I care about, and the fact that I’m able to capture any aspect of that is truly a gift. Moreover, it’s a gift that I can share, which makes it even more gratifying.

In my own professional life, I’m seeking ways to have a bigger impact. Part of that is about getting better at my craft. Part of that is about being more strategic in when, where, and how I apply it. I’m happy to be doing this. It’s what I need to be doing.

But at the end of the day, when I’m in the moment of creation, when I’m watching my craft bring groups alive, regardless of who’s in the groups or what they’re doing, I feel a lot of joy. I love doing this work, and the fact that it is inherently social means that I get to share my experiences with others. Regardless of my larger goals, photography has reminded me that it’s a gift to get to do this kind of work. I’m grateful for that reminder.

Early Morning Community at the Music Concourse

I took my second ever photography class recently. Once again, the focus was on story. Dorothy Kimmel of the Richmond District branch of the San Francisco Public Library organized this wonderful workshop, which was led by photojournalist Frederic Larsen. The idea was simple: Get people from the neighborhood to document the stories of the neighborhood through photography.

I chose to photograph the community that comes together in the wee hours of the morning at the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park. The idea started last year, when I did a six-week stint at Koi Fitness’s bootcamp. The trainers and participants were wonderful, and I discovered that they were just some of many who gathered at that same spot every morning at sunrise.

Not being an early morning person myself, I was curious about who these people were and what drew them to that place. I also realized how beautiful the park is in at dawn and how wonderfully meditative it feels. My goal was to capture the mood and the stories through pictures.

You can view the complete set above or on Flickr, and you can watch me below presenting my work at a reception for the project last night.

I shot this over the course of two weeks. It was a tremendous learning experience. Briefly:

  • Telling stories is different from taking snapshots. It takes work and commitment to get the shots you want. More importantly, it takes time to gain the trust of your subjects and access into their lives. I was frustrated and intimidated by this in the early stages of shooting, but over time, I saw what a difference it made to simply show up every day.
  • There’s this crazy idea that storytellers are supposed to be passive, neutral observers. There’s no such thing. How you integrate into the story has a huge impact on your ability to tell it. As I got to know people, I gained their trust, and I was able to take more intimate, interesting pictures.
  • I was self-conscious about taking pictures of strangers without their permission. What I discovered was that many people invited me into their lives because of my camera (along with showing up every day). It gave me access that I would not have been able to get otherwise.
  • Taking the actual shot is actually one of the least important parts of being a good photographer. I’ve already mentioned one — gaining access. The other is curation. The best photographers take bad shots; they’re just disciplined enough not to show them.
  • Curation isn’t just about highlighting your best looking shots. It’s about picking the best shots that tell your story. Pruning my set was hard enough, but eliminating shots I loved visually but did nothing for the story was painful. And, it made for a stronger story in the end.

I feel like I’m just beginning with this story, and I hope to continue shooting, but here it is for now. I’m very appreciative of the opportunity to do this work and to get feedback and guidance from Fred, Dorothy, Natalie Shrik (who filmed an awesome three-minute documentary of the project), and all of my fellow workshop participants. Thanks especially to those folks who let me photograph them, especially the wonderful folks at Koi Fitness.

As always, I love feedback! Let me know what you liked and didn’t like, and why. Please be honest; I have thick skin!