changemakers – Page 2 – Eugene Eric Kim

Figuring out How to Steer

Published June 7, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

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!

Survey on Changemaker Challenges

Published May 13, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

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!

Changemaker Bootcamp: An Experiment in Practice and Mentorship

Published April 10, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

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:

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“Balance Bikes” for Changemakers

Published April 9, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

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.

Changemakers, Want to Learn With Me?

Published March 8, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve learned an incredible amount over the past decade helping changemakers work more collaboratively and skillfully. (If you don’t know me or are not a regular reader of this blog, you can read up on my background.)

It was a fulfilling, but difficult path, and I’d love to find ways to make it easier and safer for others who are similarly motivated and with similar values. This was a big motivation for founding Groupaya, and I loved every chance I had to do it.

Even though I’ve left, I’m still fortunate to have great people requesting my help. I say no to most requests, but if the project is small or informal enough, I’ll occasionally say yes. I’ve been using these projects as opportunities to give associates real-life opportunities to practice, with me at their side giving guidance along the way.

I’d like to do a lot more of this. I’m curious if there are other changemakers out there in the world (or who at least read my blog) who would be interested in working and learning with me on small-scale (for now), real-life practice opportunities.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

Living in San Francisco. If you’re not here, I still want to know you, but right now, I want to focus my energy on people who are local.
Passion. If you’re in it for consulting leads, go elsewhere. If you’re in it because you’re passionate about changing the world, about activating the potential of groups, both large and small, and about learning, then I want to know you.
Beginner’s mind. This is the big one. I want people who are anxious to learn at all costs and who aren’t too high-falutin’ to get their hands dirty. (Literally, in some cases.) Motivation and attitude are far more important than experience. Definitely don’t flash your OD / OB / OL degrees or your facilitation certifications or your daily consulting rate at me. I don’t care, and it will likely bias me against you.

You don’t have to be a consultant, aspiring or practicing. In fact, I’m particularly interested in working with changemakers embedded in organizations.

Interested? Drop me an email (eekim-at-eekim-dot-com) or leave me a comment below. And please share this with others who might be interested!