High-Performance Collaboration

Collaboration Lessons from Disaster Documentaries and Other “Unexpected” Sources

Published February 27, 2023February 27, 2023 by Eugene Eric Kim

This post is for anyone who has ever asked me for book recommendations on collaboration.

Yesterday, Carmen Medina‘s wrote a wonderful blog post on the television documentary series, Air Disasters. (It’s known as Mayday in Canada.) She shares a number of insights she gathered from the show on human performance, systems design, and leadership in general. For example:

The Importance of Sleep and Good Rest:

Commercial airlines have strict rules about how many hours flight crews can work before they must rest…. These rules reflect hard lessons learned about how poor rest and lack of sleep can degrade the cognitive performance and judgment of pilots…. The aviation industry learned long ago that “people just have to tough it out” is not a useful strategy.

Hierarchy Can Kill You:

Traditionally the captain and the first officer in commercial aviation were in a command and obey-orders relationship. But captains are not infallible and there are several fatal accidents that could have been avoided if the first officer had been listened to. Oftentimes the captain would have had a hard time “hearing” the other view because the first officer actually never verbalized his concern. The respect for hierarchy was so paralyzing that first officers have deferred to wrongheaded captains even when it led to certain death. These types of accidents became so concerning for the aviation industry that airlines instituted mandatory crew resource management procedures that emphasize the importance of collaboration and teamwork in the cockpit.

Who’s Accountable?

As airline crash investigators know, many airplane accidents involve a chain of unlikely events, any one of which would rarely occur. A supervisor decides to pitch in and help his overworked maintenance team by removing a set of screws. The maintenance team isn’t able to finish the job but don’t know to replace the screws. Nevertheless, the plane makes many safe landings and takeoffs until a pilot decides to make an unusually fast descent. The pilot and all the passengers die.

Who exactly is accountable here? Is it the supervisor who tried to be helpful? Or the airline management that under-resourced its maintenance operations? Or the pilot? In many organizations, holding someone “accountable” is the signature move of “strong leaders”. But what often happens is that some unfortunate individual is held to blame for what was a systemic failure of an organization — often driven by complacency, expediency, and/or greed.

These are all really good lessons, all from watching a television show! Of course, it’s a little disingenuous to say that. Carmen was a long-time leader at the CIA with a lifetime of hard-earned experiences. Most of us would not be able to recognize the deeper lessons that Carmen did, much less articulate them so clearly. This is what the best authors do — pull good insights from all kinds of places, some of them unexpected — and package them in a clear and compelling way. Not surprisingly, Carmen is one of those authors.

Still, when it comes to collaboration at least, I find that many people seem to eschew sources like television documentaries or — more dishearteningly — their own experiences for books written by “experts.” You don’t have to have been a CEO at a Fortune 500 company or a business school professor to have had amazing insights and experiences on collaboration. (Honestly, I don’t think many CEOs or business school professors would even make my list of top collaboration practitioners.)

Do you have a family? Friends? Classmates? A partner of any sort, business or life? Are you in a band? Do you play pickup sports or volunteer in your community? If so, I promise you, you already have a lifetime of experiences on which to draw. It’s only a matter of being intentional about sifting through your experiences for insights and trying to practice what you learn. Once you start doing this, you’ll start to recognize deeper lessons from all sorts of places, some of them unexpected. I use television and movie clips all the time to help groups learn how to recognize and navigate power dynamics. For those of you follow this blog, I obviously write a lot about basketball, and athlete podcasts have been a particularly rich source of insights for me for a while now. (My favorites are All the Smoke and The Old Man and the Three.) Over the past few years, I’ve been learning a ton about systems design and collaboration from watching birds and experimenting with bird feeders.

Deeply examining your own experiences and drawing from unexpected sources are much more effective for learning about collaboration than reading a book, and they’re far more fun.

Lessons from Sports #738: Alignment and Long-Term Planning

Published April 26, 2017 by Eugene Eric Kim

Balancing short- and long-term strategic planning is hard largely because they often conflict. A great example of this is when the Green Bay Packers drafted Aaron Rodgers in 2005. It was a shocking choice, because the Packers already had a future Hall of Fame quarterback in Brett Favre, and they had short-term needs at other positions. Furthermore, Rodgers was far from a sure thing. The Packers were sacrificing their immediate effectiveness for a potential Favre replacement 3-5 years in the future.

In sports, part of how you enforce the discipline of balancing the short- and long-term is by separating the roles of coach (short-term) and general manager (long-term). Andrew Brandt, the Packers former vice president of player finance, described how this dynamic played out when choosing to draft Rodgers:

We get to 24 and we got one name staring at us, and it’s Aaron Rodgers. We know we have the most durable quarterback in football [Favre], so I can just sense [in] the room to my right were the coaching rumblings where you could just sense they’re like “Oh my God, are we really going to do this? We’re going to take a player that can’t help us this year, maybe not next year, maybe not the year after, maybe never.” There was some rumbling. And I sense what was going on to my left side, which is more management oriented, and it was the same thing they always say, which is trust the board. We put in all our scouting, we’re going to take the best player available. And obviously management won out over coaching. It was one of those ultimate best-player-available decisions. But you look at the Green Bay Packers that year, that’s the last thing you would think that we’d pick.

It turned out to be the right choice. Rodgers replaced Favre three years later (while Favre was still good), has been two Super Bowls (winning one), and is almost surely a future Hall of Famer.

What would it look like if more organizations (especially smaller ones) had separate roles responsible for short- versus long-term planning?

(The article above is also an excellent case study on the imperfect science of decision-making.)

In other sports news, the historically great Golden State Warriors eliminated the Portland Trailblazers from the NBA playoffs, 4-0. Afterward, the Blazers star point guard, Damian Lillard (who had an outstanding series), commented on how “together” and “on the same wavelength” the Warriors play.

It’s extraordinary commentary coming from a great basketball player on a very good team. At this level, every team invests heavily on getting everybody on the same page, and all good teams achieve that. But there are clearly different levels of alignment, and when you reach higher levels, you play at higher levels. I think it speaks powerfully to the importance of alignment, which most organizations in other fields do not value as highly as professional sports teams.

(As an aside, my friend, Pete Forsyth, wrote a great article about Lillard, free licenses, and Wikipedia in 2014. I recently helped make Pete famous in the Oregon sports world this past week when the above, Creative Commons-licensed photo I took of him sporting his Lillard jersey at a Warriors game appeared in this Willamette Week article this past Monday.)

Faster Than 20: My New Website on High-Performance Collaboration

Published December 13, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

Last week, I quietly launched a new website called Faster Than 20. It’s a place where I can share stories more intentionally about high-performance collaboration. It’s also a place where I can share my tools, frameworks, and lessons from my experiments.

Why a new website? Isn’t that what this blog has been about?

Yes and no. I’ve written a lot here about my work over the past 10 years, and I will continue to do so. But the primary goal of this site was never to build an audience. It was to capture whatever happened to be clunking around in my head.

If I had a thought that I wanted to make sure I captured somewhere, I could blog about it here. Most of those thoughts were about my work, although I’ve diverged more and more from that over the years. I never worried about being coherent or concise. I never worried about blogging regularly (or too frequently). I never worried about staying “on topic.” I just wrote what was in my head.

It was a liberating way to frame this little experiment of mine, and it’s been incredibly generative. I’m proud of the good stuff I’ve written, and I don’t worry about the less good stuff. Perhaps the most surprising and delightful thing has been that I have unwittingly built an audience, despite my best intentions. It’s small, and it’s largely (but not entirely) built around existing relationships, but it’s wonderful, and it’s made the whole experience much more fulfilling.

Earlier this year, as I was ruminating about how I could be making a bigger impact, I started trying to find great, well-organized resources on the web for actionable, meaningful information on how to collaborate more effectively. I was shocked to realize that there really aren’t any. There are plenty of websites like this one, but you have to wade around to find the nuggets. That’s a problem, and it’s one that I feel like I’m capable of addressing. But I didn’t want to address that here. I like having a place where I can ramble about anything.

So I started Faster Than 20. It’s not a new company, just a home for my thinking, my experiments, and lots of stories about high-performance collaboration. I’m being very focused about my audience — practitioners wanting to learn more about collaboration — and about meeting their needs. That means making it easy to follow in terms of content, frequency, organization, and channels. I’ll also be exploring lots of different ways to share stories more effectively through visuals and other media.

If you’re a practitioner looking for a great resource on collaboration, I’d encourage you to follow Faster Than 20. You can subscribe via email, Twitter, or RSS. There are three blog posts right now, with many more to come:

I would especially love to hear what you would find valuable. Please share your ideas below in the comments.

Finally, I’ll continue to post rambling thoughts here, not just about collaboration but about all the other things I’m interested in. If you’re interested in that too (and I love you if you are), many thanks, and please keep coming back!

The Art and Importance of Giving and Receiving Negative Feedback

Published October 30, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

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.