Sophistication Versus Literacy

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I frame my work and mission around this notion of collaborative literacy. The idea is that our ability to collaborate effectively can be thought of as a type of literacy, something that we can develop and enhance through practice.

There are lots of great examples of how this manifests itself in other fields. A few weeks ago, I talked about cooking literacy in a Faster Than 20 blog post entitled, “Chefs, Not Recipes: The Tyranny of Tools and Best Practices.”

Tony Zhou’s wonderful video (brought to my attention via Alan Murabayashi’s blog post) talks about movie-making literacy using action film auteur Michael Bay as his subject. It’s a thoughtful breakdown of the difference between visual sophistication and visual literacy. At worst, if you’re a movie fan, you’ll walk away with a very concrete understanding of “Bayhem.”

I see a similar phenomenon in a lot of collaborative processes, where people patch together tools and “hot” concepts into experiences that seem collaboratively sophisticated, but that aren’t particularly collaboratively literate. Getting people into a circle and putting up lots of stickies does not necessarily equate to a great collaborative experience. I’d like to help prevent collaborative Bayhem.

The Practice of Generosity

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Jessica and Christy

I spent this past weekend spectating while friends and family achieved acts of extraordinary physical exertion. On Saturday, I watched my friend, Greg, complete a full Ironman in Sonoma County — a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, and ending with a full marathon (26.2 miles). On Sunday, I watched my sister, Jessica, run her first marathon, which might seem modest next to an Ironman, but is well past the threshold of sanity in my mind.

I will never truly understand what compels people to push their bodies to such extremes. What I have come to understand is the important role that community plays.

My sister runs regularly with friends, a few of whom also participated in the marathon. Those who decided not to run the whole thing volunteered to act as running buddies for parts of the race. My sister had someone running with her for the last 12 miles — no small thing at that point in the race, when your body is constantly telling you to quit. (She’s pictured above with her friend, Christy, who ran the last six miles with her.)

I ran with her from miles 14 through 18. I’m in decent shape, but I’ve never run in an organized race or for more than nine miles (I consider five miles a long run), so I had a hard time relating to my fellow runners at that point. What I could plainly see was that most of the runners were in a lot of pain. Many ran with a labored gait, and many others stopped repeatedly to walk. All along the way, several people had stopped to catch their breath or stretch.

It felt surreal to be running with so many people at once and to feel strong and fully conscious while everyone else seemed to be in pain and slightly unaware. I was in awe of the grit and perseverance of my temporary companions, even while questioning their sanity. Then again, while it was meaningful to experience this viscerally, I wasn’t altogether surprised by it. After all, they had all chosen to run 26.2 miles.

What surprised me was the overwhelming generosity — from the people cheering on the runners every step of the way to the volunteers to the runners themselves, who were constantly looking out for each other, gladly sharing their water and other aids to those in need. There was a bond of mutual support between the runners that was unmistakable, extending well beyond specific actions. I saw knowing nods and glances that seemed to acknowledge the hundreds of hours and miles of perseverance that they all knew each other had experienced. There was no faking it. You couldn’t be there if you hadn’t put in the time.

Everyone cared about each other, and everyone rooted for each other. It felt pretty awesome to experience that first-hand, and it made me wonder what the world would be like if we were all like these runners, if we could all feel that constancy of mutual support.

Upon further reflection, I decided that we are already all like that. We do fundamentally care about each other, and we are fundamentally generous with each other. We just aren’t necessarily conscious about it, nor are we conscious about practicing it. Running brings it out in people, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t be more like that in other aspects of our lives.

My friend and colleague, Renee, is constantly asking about the principles of effective collaboration, a framework upon which we can build and practice. I find these requests challenging, because I feel like these principles have already been articulated by many people, that the framework already exists and is widely understood. Having Renee is a useful foil, because it forces me to challenge and test my assumptions, and it’s surfaced lots of places where I’ve been wrong.

However, I have one nagging belief that has not yet been disproven. I believe that the main reason that it feels like there’s no clear framework for effective collaboration is that the suggested principles seem too simplistic, too obvious.

For example, generosity is a clearly an important principle in effective networks. “Of course!” you might say. “But there must be something else! That can’t be it!”

Are you sure?

At Leadership Learning Community’s Creating Space conference last May, there was a brainstorming session on modules for developing network leadership. We had a number of smart, creative minds in the room, but we got stuck almost immediately. People seemed overwhelmed by the complexity of it all.

I suggested that we focus on one thing and encouraged folks not to censor themselves. Simple, “obvious” ideas were more than okay. They were great!

We chose to focus on generosity as a practice. The group generated a slew of good, interesting ideas. One of them was a generosity award, which anyone could award to anyone else. All they needed to do was to fashion the award out of pipe cleaners and give it someone. It was so simple, we decided to test the idea right then and there.

People started fashioning awards to give to their peers, and three things became immediately apparent.

  1. There were some highly skilled pipe cleaner artists in the room.
  2. People had no problem identifying acts of generosity that had happened over the course of two days among a group of people who largely did not know each other.
  3. Simply naming the generosity that was already happening in the room was itself an act of generosity, one that created a stronger bond and greater sense of community among the group.

Many of the principles of effective collaboration are simple and obvious, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong or insufficient. If we’re going to make progress in the world, we need to start with the simple, the timeless, the human. We need to commit to these things, to practice them unrelentingly, and to give them time to work before we give up on them and seek something new.

Fortunately, while we may forget these principles in our every day work and lives, there are plenty of good models that remind us of their simple, yet critical importance as well as their strong desirability. Running with my sister, watching her, my friend, and their people persevere, and experiencing their community firsthand was a wonderful reminder of what the world would be like if we were all more generous with each other.

Leonardo Da Vinci on Human Ingenuity and Nature

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

From The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (Jean Paul Richter, 1888), XIV Anatomy, Zoology and Physiology:

Though human ingenuity may make various inventions… it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous, and she needs no counterpoise when she makes limbs proper for motion in the bodies of animals.

Thanks to Andrew James Campbell for sharing.

Learning via Artifacts: A Conversation with Dave Gray

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Next Wednesday, April 2, 2014 at 12:30pm PDT, I’ll be participating in a public Google Hangout with my friend, Dave Gray. The conversation will be about learning via artifacts. All are welcome to watch. We’ll also be using a public Boardthing to take notes during the conversation, and we encourage everyone to join in that as well.

Why are we doing this, and what exactly is “learning via artifacts” all about?

The short answer is that this is a response to my recent blog post over on Faster Than 20, “Documenting Is Not Learning.” That post was a mini-rant on how many people seem to equate “learning systems” with trying to get people to write down and file everything that’s in their heads so that others can read and access them. It’s an incredibly naive approach, but people often pour thousands of dollars (and sometimes orders of magnitude more) into trying to build these kinds of systems, most of which inevitably fail.

My overwhelming desire to make this point caused me to wave my hands past a subtle, but equally important point, one that is foundational to all the work that I do: The process of documenting is one of the most powerful ways of catalyzing learning.

Dave (and a few others, actually) called me out on this point on Facebook. I agreed, and I said I needed to write a followup. But since I was already talking with him about this, and since he happens to be one of the foremost practitioners in this space, I figured it would be much more interesting to highlight his voice. Thus, next Wednesday’s Google Hangout was born.

The Boardthing is a huge bonus. Dave and his team recently created a wonderful collaborative tool that is the online equivalent of putting stickies on walls. If that sounds simple, it is, but when done right, it’s also incredibly powerful. Up until now, no one has done it right. We’ll use Boardthing to model what we’ll be talking about, and we hope that many of you will jump in as well.

The long story starts with this gift from Dave on October 18, 2006:

Designing for Emergence

Dave was participating in a collaboration workshop I was facilitating in St. Louis. To him, this isn’t anything special. This is simply the way he takes notes.

To me, this was a gift on many levels. Whenever I think about that workshop, I think of this image first. I actually took copious notes from that workshop, some of which I even blogged. I wrote a piece about the things I said that led to Dave drawing this. I also posted pictures from that workshop, including shots of the flipcharts from the day.

There are lots of great knowledge nuggets, most of which have been sitting around, collecting virtual dust for years. Until I think about this picture, that is. This image, for me, is the start of a trail, and whenever I start poking around it again, I remember old insights, and I look at them in new ways. I’m willing to bet that this holds true for whomever reads this, that you are far more likely to start poking around than you would have had you not seen the picture. There is something about the visual that draws us in, that stirs our emotions, that makes us want to know more.

This is all after-the-fact learning. But what about in-the-moment learning? What was happening in Dave’s head as he drew that picture? How did the act of drawing help him learn? What would happen if you made that synthesis process collaborative? How would that impact learning?

I’ll leave you all with these questions for now. This is the stuff that we’ll be talking about this coming Wednesday. But I do want to say a few more things about Dave.

Dave is and has been my hero in so many ways. I’ve known many brilliant visual thinkers and learners for many years, but there has always been something about Dave’s style and presence that has encouraged me to practice these skills myself more actively in a way that others haven’t.

The first time we met, he explained to me how he draws stick figures. His trick? Draw the body first. Why? Because body language says so much! That’s really the essence of what you’re trying to communicate. How freakin’ simple and brilliant is that?!

My partnership with Amy Wu over the years has been strongly influenced and inspired by Dave and his work, and you can see that in the evolution of my slides over the years and even in the Faster Than 20 website. What you don’t see in those final products are all of the sketches that both Amy and I drew to help us think through these ideas. Dave is one of the people who strongly inspired me to work this way.

To me, Dave personifies the learning mindset. At XPLANE, the wonderful design consultancy he founded years ago, he started something called Visual Thinking School, one of the ideas that inspired me to start Changemaker Bootcamp last year. He is a great speaker and writer, but he is also constantly making things — tools like Boardthing, companies like XPLANE, brilliant books like The Connected Company, beautiful paintings.

When he learns, he learns out loud, so that others can participate in and benefit from all aspects of his process, not just the beautiful, final artifacts. He wanted to learn more about Agile processes, so he decided to write a book about it. He’s interviewing great practitioners in order to learn, and he’s doing them live on Google Hangout, so others can learn with him.

I love every opportunity I have to chat with and learn from him, and I hope many of you will join us this Wednesday!

I’ll write a followup blog post on Faster Than 20 after our conversation about learning via artifacts, but in the meantime, you can read and watch some of the things I’ve said on this topic in the past:

Finally, here’s video from a brown bag I led in 2011 entitled, “Saving the World Through Better Note-Taking.”