Photography and Extroverted Introversion

I spent a few days in Vancouver last month for work. I had a chance to take some pictures, including a few at the beautiful Capilano Salmon Hatchery. Afterward, I took the train down to Seattle.

The train ride was beautiful, but also foggy. Because my view was limited, I decided to pull out my laptop and post-process some photos. I had some work photos that I wanted to turn around quickly, and when I got through them, I started going through some of my travel photos.

I was totally oblivious to the people around me, including an older woman sitting next to me. When I got to the above picture, she decided to interrupt me.

“Are you a photographer?” she asked.

“No, I just like taking pictures,” I responded.

“I really like that one,” she said.

“Thank you! What do you like about it?” I asked.

She started walking me through the composition and the different shades of green. She had a sophisticated eye, and I started asking her about her own photography background. Her name was Ingrid, and when she was in her 20s, she moved to Alaska and worked as an assistant to wildlife photographer, Sam Kimura. She was sort of this hippie grandmother who had lived all along the West Coast and who had done all of these fascinating things in her life.

One of the unexpected pleasures of photography as a hobby is how it’s opened up people’s lives to me. I’m not an outgoing person, but photography gives me an excuse to talk to strangers. Several months ago, I was in a coffee shop in Japantown, and I noticed this person sitting next to me drawing cartoons. I watched him out of the corner of my eye for a while, then finally asked if I could take a picture of his journal.

He was very friendly and said it was okay. His name was Evan, and this was the way he journaled about his life. We chatted for about 15 minutes, and he showed me lots of drawings, explaining the different life events they represented. If it hadn’t been for my camera, I never would have struck up a conversation with him.

 

Having a camera is also an excuse not to talk to others. I’ve been in social situations where, for whatever reason, I haven’t felt like talking to anybody. I simply start taking pictures, sometimes without even excusing myself. No one seems to mind, and I end up having a good time.

My friend, Eugene, describes this kind of behavior as extroverted introversion, which describes my personality quite nicely. They like people. They even like talking to people, even strangers, but in doses, not buckets. Photography is the perfect hobby for extroverted introverts.

Fuse: Connecting Your Car to the Rest of Your Life

I just backed my friend Phil Windley’s new Kickstarter project, Fuse. Everyone with a car should go back it now. Everyone who cares about data privacy should also go back it.

Every car has an on-board computer with tons of data: your mileage, your average speed, even your tire pressure. When you take your car into the shop, mechanics plug into this computer to access that data so that they can diagnose your car.

I’ve been wanting to access that data myself forever, and it’s not just because I’m a data geek. As someone who travels a lot for business, I track my mileage. Not only is it a royal pain to do manually, it just seems wrong, given that your car already has this data. But until recently, I had no ability to access it.

Fuse unlocks that data, and gives you access. It consists of a device that you plug into your car’s diagnostic outlet and a mobile app that gives you access to that data.

That alone should make you want this. But I’m going out of my way to blog about this project because of what Fuse does under the hood.

The problem with most of the emerging apps in this space is that they essentially trade convenience and coolness for ownership of your data. Most of us don’t pay attention to that. We’re too pre-occupied by the coolness. Some of us feel vaguely uneasy about the trade-off, but we do it anyway. Coolness is a powerful motivator.

Phil has been a leader in the digital identity space for a very long time. He literally wrote the book on it. He’s part of a community of folks who thinks that you — the individual — should own and control your data. Enabling this is a hard technical problem, but it’s an even knottier social problem.

Fuse is built on top of a trust and privacy framework that my friends, Drummond Reed and Andy Dale, have helped evolved. Fuse is cool, compelling, and socially responsible. These are the kinds of apps that will help create the kind of world that I want to live in.

If you’d like to read more about these nitty gritty aspects of Fuse, go check out Phil’s blog. If you’d like to read more about the bigger vision behind technology like this, start with Vendor Relationship Management (VRM).

Don’t forget to back the project!

The Art and Importance of Giving and Receiving Negative Feedback

My senior year of high school, I became the editor-in-chief of our school newspaper. For a variety of reasons, I had a huge chip on my shoulder about it. Most of the founders of the paper had graduated, and very few of my classmates were active participants, leaving me with an inexperienced staff. Furthermore, the previous editor-in-chief had publicly declared that he did not think we would be successful.

Unfortunately, for the first few months of my tenure, I was proving him right. I was a horrible manager, and that chip on my shoulder made me ten times worse. No one was living up to my expectations, and I made that brutally clear to everyone. I knew that people didn’t like hearing from me, but I didn’t care, because I felt justified in how I was feeling.

One day, a classmate contributed an article that I didn’t like. I can’t remember exactly what I said to him, but it was something along the lines of, “This article sucks,” only meaner and less constructive.

My friend — who had never dealt with me in this context before — blew up at me. He said, “If you want people to contribute to the paper, you can’t treat people that way.” Then he stormed out of the room.

This all happened over 20 years ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. It was a defining moment for me, because I realized that I was being a total asshole, that being an asshole was not a measure of good leadership, and that I generally did not like the feeling of being an asshole.

I apologized to a lot of people that day, starting with that friend. If I could do it all over again, I also would have thanked him. Without his clear and specific feedback, I would not have had the self-awareness to turn things around. It put me on a path to becoming a better leader.

It also made me empathetic toward people who behaved like I had. People who behave like assholes might not realize it or might not be doing it on purpose, and they might appreciate getting that feedback so that they can work on correcting it. I’ve met a lot of leaders who are honestly surprised to receive this kind of feedback, because no one has ever offered it to them before.

It’s risky to be on the other side of that, because it’s safer to assume that someone behaving like an asshole already realizes it and doesn’t particularly care either way. If that’s the case, then offering that feedback might have negative consequences. But if you stay silent, then no one wins. No one has any chance of improving, and the situation will likely perpetuate itself.

A friend of mine who works in tech recently related a story where she felt slighted by another member of her team. It’s possible that it was unintentional, and it’s also possible that it reflected a pervasive culture of sexism. Regardless, I encouraged her to have a conversation with that teammate and to explain how his actions made her feel. I encouraged her to be specific and non-accusational (e.g. “Your action made me feel slighted because of this”). I explained that if I were in the position of her teammate, that I would want that kind of feedback.

I also understand that offering that feedback puts her at risk. Her teammate might not care, or worse, might ridicule her. It might affect their long-term working relationship.

Not saying anything only guarantees that the working relationship will remain damaged, and it increases the likelihood that these incidents will happen again. Furthermore, this particular friend is both strong and relational. I know she’ll find a way to communicate this clearly and compassionately.

That said, it’s easy for me to offer this advice to someone else. It’s a lot harder to do. It requires a lot of courage.

As a leader (especially one who can be intimidating to others), how do you make it safe for your teammates to give you this kind of feedback?

First, make it an explicit team norm. Whenever I form a new team, I make time to discuss how we want to work together and to come up with a set of shared groundrules. If the team makes it a shared goal to give this kind of feedback to each other, it becomes about enforcing shared norms rather than being some kind of personal beef.

Second, invite feedback. If you’re not constantly asking for feedback and making it clear that you welcome it, don’t expect to get it.

My recent forays into photography have really underlined this point for me. Before, when I would share pictures, most of the feedback I got was superficial — “great photos!” or perhaps a like on Facebook. Now, I make it clear that I’m trying to get better and that I want feedback, especially critical. When I get positive feedback, I also ask people to get specific, so that they’re not just telling me they like something, they’re telling me why they like something.

It’s been an incredible process. I’ve gotten feedback I never would have gotten otherwise, which has made me a better photographer. I’ve discovered that most of my friends are actually quite sophisticated in evaluating pictures. And, some of my friends have discovered the same thing about themselves, which has been a cool revelation for them! I’ve had friends say to me, “I’ve never really talked about photography in that way before… and I like it!”

Third, model giving and receiving constructive feedback. This is always the hardest thing to do. I’m pretty good at choosing my words carefully, so that I’m describing what I’m seeing and feeling as opposed to projecting. I’m not good at managing my emotions through my body language. If I’m frustrated or angry, I may use safe language, but my body language often sends a different message. It requires a tremendous amount of self-awareness and centering practice to master those emotions so that you can communicate more effectively.

As for receiving feedback, here’s how I see it. I know that I am sexist, racist, and prejudiced in a thousand other ways. We all are, even if that’s not our intention. I work hard to treat people fairly, but I am not going to be successful all the time. So the best I can do is to be clear about my aspirations, recognize that I will make mistakes, be accountable and compassionate when I make them, and try my best to improve.

A Shining Example of Failure, Courage, and Learning

Last year, I co-led a project called the Delta Dialogues, an effort to rebuild trust and shared understanding around critical water issues in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. I’m very proud of that work, and knowing that I would have to let go of this project was one of the things that made leaving Groupaya last year very difficult. However, I also knew that I left the project in the capable hands of Kristin Cobble and Jeff Conklin. Moreover, the success of this project ultimately hinges on the participants themselves, and we had a wonderful core.

From the start, we designed the Dialogues to be a transparent process. We hired my friend, Joe Mathews, to be the storyteller, and we gave him one task: Write what you see. He’s been doing that beautifully from day one, from the monthly blog posts on the Delta Dialogues website to his beautiful narrative in the Phase 1 Final Report.

Tonight, I came across Joe’s latest blog post, a description of last month’s meeting. On the one hand, it was hard to read. It was clearly not a good meeting, and clearly, my old team contributed to that.

On the other hand, I felt very proud. I’m proud of my old team, I’m proud of my old client, the Delta Conservancy, and I’m proud of all of the Delta Dialogues participants for continuing to demonstrate a commitment to transparency. It could not have been easy to experience a meeting like this, and seeing it described in this way for all to see could not have made it feel any better.

However, any attempt to solve a truly meaningful problem is, by nature, complicated and messy. When I see stories like this, I trust that I’m getting an authentic picture of what’s happening, and I also get an opportunity to actually learn from it. That doesn’t happen when you whitewash your story, prioritizing perception over learning. Most of the “failure movement” in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector feels whitewashed to me. We need to see a lot more authentic sharing if we’re going to get better at this kind of work, and I’m proud that my old team is modeling this.

I wrote previously about including a checkbox for failure in your list of success metrics, where I told a story of a failure we had at one of the Delta Dialogues meetings that I facilitated. Honestly, that story is like a badge of honor to me. We failed, because we tried something that was hard, we learned from that experience, and we made things better as a result. I’m betting that this most recent failure will turn out to be the same for the current team.

What can others learn from this particular failure? I’m sure there were a thousand things that could have been better, and I’m sure that Kristin and Jeff have been exhaustive in cataloging all of them. I’m also quite certain that they violated the first rule of Changemaker Bootcamp a thousand times over, and I probably would have done so as well if I were in their shoes. It’s easier to see the bigger picture from the outside. I had two major takeaways.

First, I was struck by the simplicity of Joe’s observation that 40 percent of the participants at this meeting were new. That should have been an immediate red flag, and yet, I can also understand how easy it might have been to miss that.

In Phase One, we brought a wide array of sophisticated tools, and yet, these only contributed in small ways to our success. The vast majority of our success was due to our ability to co-create a safe container with the participants  in which to have a very challenging discussion.

This was less about sophistication and more about effort. We devoted an incredible amount of time discussing this among ourselves and with the participants. We even threw in an additional meeting for free, because we felt it was critical to get right, and we needed more time in order to do so. We spent almost half of our precious time with participants doing site visits, rotating the location of the meetings, and giving participants a chance to viscerally experience each other’s lives and livelihoods. None of these ideas were particularly sophisticated, but the decision to prioritize these things in the face of many other pressures required skill and discipline.

In many ways, the current team was a victim of the original team’s success. Once you successfully create a container, people start taking it for granted, and it’s much harder to prioritize. If I were still leading the project, I don’t know if I would have had the skill and discipline to focus on these things in the face of intense pressure to do otherwise.

But, at the end of the day, facts are facts. Seven out of 17 of the participants that day were new. That’s a very large number. In that situation, you either have to commit time to reinforcing the container (either before or during the meeting), or you have to turn participants away.

Second, Jeff clearly had a bad day. I have worked with many great facilitators, and I have seen several of them have bad days. One of the things I learned from Matt and Gail Taylor was the importance of building a great support team and structure around the facilitators to increase the likelihood of their success. Otherwise, the only way a facilitator can be successful — especially when dealing with a wicked problem and a challenging environment — is by being superhuman.

No one is superhuman. Everybody has bad days, even with a great support structure around them. I think a lot of facilitators forget this, and when they have a bad day, they punish themselves relentlessly. Jeff is one of the truly great facilitators in the world. If he can have a bad day, then anyone can. This stuff is hard. It’s important not to lose sight of that.

The Delta Dialogues participants are committed and resilient. They’ll be back, and the process will get back on track.

Doug Engelbart Video Tributes

This past July, shortly after Doug Engelbart passed away, his friends organized a moving memorial for him. There were many wonderful tributes, and a television journalist also did some short video interviews with people who knew him well. If you’re interested in getting a tiny taste of who Doug was, the videos — especially the tributes — are a great source for that.

Here’s my interview (~6 minutes):

Here’s what Brad Neuberg (~7 minutes) and Jon Cheyer (~6 minutes), my HyperScope teammates, said:

Here’s what Adam Cheyer said (~8 minutes):

You can view the whole list here.