A Shining Example of Failure, Courage, and Learning

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

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.

Be Intentional, but Hold It Lightly

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Seb Paquet and I had our second weekly call this morning. (Our “jazz hands” insights video from this week’s call is below.) Seb opened the conversation by sharing a personal story and discussing the importance of being fearless, but not reckless.

Which raises the question: What’s the difference between “fearless” and “reckless”?

After our conversation, Seb posted this very question on Facebook. There were a number of interesting replies, with more likely to come. Two, in particular, resonated with me. Alan Yelsey suggested that the distinction was in whether or not you “fully considered the risk or the value of the objective.” Helen Aitkin noted that the etymology of “reckless” was “without care.”

I agree with both Alan and Helen. I think that intention is the critical distinction, which is still a very fine line. If you take a risk that has a 90 percent chance of failing, and you understand that risk up-front, you are being intentional, but other people might still consider it reckless.

So many of the challenges that we face are ultimately about navigating tensions gracefully. By definition, there are no easy ways to describe how to do this. The best principle I’ve found for navigating these tensions is to be intentional, but hold it lightly.

In other words, have a goal, but don’t be so bound by it that you miss out on the opportunity to learn. Put a stake in the ground, but be open to surprises and new learning. If you practice this basic principle over and over again, you eventually develop an instinct for how to assess risk and navigate uncertainty. If you move without clarity about your intentions, or if you hold on to those intentions too tightly, you will likely fail.

This, to me, is the essence of craft, and it’s become the foundational principle of my work.

I shared this principle with my friend, Mark Bolgiano, a few years ago, and he noted that this same principle applies to golf. You need to have a strategy for how you are going to propel your ball to the hole, but if you grip your club too tightly, you will likely miss your mark. I found this to be a nice physical metaphor for how to think about this principle.

Similarly, Seb brought up the analogy of scientists discovering anomalies in their experiments and reacting in frustration, when the anomalies may actually be clues to some groundbreaking new principle. If you hold onto your intentions too tightly, you miss out on the learning.

The discipline of being intentional is an art form in and of itself. On both calls with Seb so far, we’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing the challenges of setting good goals and being explicit about success. Here are some principles that have emerged along with some relevant blog posts:

  • Define success as a spectrum, from minimum to wild. Seb was the first to share this principle in our conversations by way of a great template from Amy Kirschner. He also noted the importance of considering the zone of proximal development. I first picked up this idea from Kristin Cobble (read her blog post for more), who was strongly influenced by Robert Fritz’s “rubber band model” for navigating tensions.
  • Define both success and failure. This is a good way of coming up with and gut-checking your spectrum of success, and it was my “jazz hands” moment from today’s conversation. When we are far removed from the actual moment of assessing success or failure, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we might treat something as success when we actually believe it to be failure. If you ask, “What is failure?” explicitly, you can identify this behavior well in advance.
  • Ask the “wild” success question twice. In the same way that we might be overly lax in defining minimal success, we can often be overly constrained in defining “wild” success. We self-censor ourselves, because we don’t really believe that wild success is possible. Another trick I picked up from Kristin is to ask this question twice, explaining, “Okay, how would you really, truly define wild success?”
  • Always measure something, and evolve your metrics as you learn. If you rely purely on how you feel, you will either rationalize your way into thinking you are always successful, or you will punish yourself unfairly.
  • Include failure rate in your definition of success. This was Seb’s “jazz hands” moment from our conversation. If you’re trying to accomplish anything hard, you need to expect that you will fail some percentage of the time. You should actually incorporate that failure rate into your success metrics. We agreed that succeeding about two-thirds of the time felt about right, which is consistent with Google’s expected measure of success.

Here’s a story I shared last year about applying the principle of being intentional and holding it lightly on one particular project. And, without further ado, here are Seb and my “jazz hands” moments from today:

Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

My Self-Care Dashboard

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

When Kristin Cobble and I were starting Groupaya, we spent a lot of time discussing the kind of culture we wanted as an organization. In particular, we both felt strongly about the importance of integrating personal development into our daily work lives.

In order to meet this goal, Kristin designed a collective process for us based on Daniel Ofman’s Core Quality Framework. The premise of the framework is that our biggest pitfalls are our greatest strengths (our “core qualities”) taken to an extreme. We all reflected about ourselves and about each other using the framework as a guide. It was enlightening to compare the differences in perception.

For example, I identified my drive to learn as my core quality. Too much of that led to dabbling and lack of focus — my pitfall. Kristin and Rebecca Petzel, on the other hand, both chose to focus on my high standards as my core quality. My corresponding pitfall was my tendency to drive myself and my team mercilessly when my standards weren’t being met. They wanted me to be more accepting when people made mistakes and more patient with people’s learning curves.

As we explored this further, we agreed that I actually wasn’t bad at these things. I had evolved these skills through lots of practice over the years. The problem was that these were not natural qualities for me, and when I was stressed or tired (which was often during my stint at Groupaya), Grumpy Eugene would come out of his cave.

Each of us had to commit to a practice to help counteract our pitfalls. Because I was generally good at being patient when I was taking care of myself, I committed to self-care. And the way I would do that was to commit to playing basketball once a week.

I had asked my friend, Lisa Heft, to work with me as a coach the previous year. One of the things I realized from that work was that when I’m playing basketball regularly, I’m generally happy and centered. Needless to say, I was not playing regularly at the time, much less exercising at all. I figured that committing to basketball once-a-week was more than reasonable, easily trackable, and would pay off big.

Despite all that, I got off to a bad start in 2012. We were swamped with the usual challenges of running a business and dealing with client work, and as usual, I neglected my self-care practices. What was different this time was that I felt bad about my neglect, because I had made a commitment to my team, and I wasn’t living up to it.

In order to turn this around, I decided to track my progress in a simple Google Spreadsheet, and to share this with my colleagues, so that they could check up on my progress anytime. I had a row for each week of 2012, and a column for the number of times I had played basketball that week.

The simple act of tracking in the open had a transformative effect on my practice. It forced me to think about the practice regularly, and it allowed me to see in very concrete ways how I was doing.

Over the next several months, I evolved my spreadsheet to incorporate new practices and learning. For example, I wouldn’t always play basketball, but I would sometimes go on runs or long walks, and while that wasn’t as good as basketball, it was definitely good for me (and my colleagues) overall. So I started tracking that too.

I eventually added two more practices to my spreadsheet: turning off work email in the evenings and on weekends, and taking play days in the middle of the week. Every time I did one of my practices, I gave myself a point. Using a line graph, I charted the total number of points per week as well as the four-week running average.

I also added a notes section for context. There were weeks that were restorative despite not doing any of my practices, and I wanted to be sure I noted that. There were weeks when I was traveling or sick.

The chart essentially became my personal dashboard, and my practices became almost a game — keep the line above 1 (my commitment to my team). It was very challenging for me to maintain that on my own, so I started incorporating other tricks such as signing up for a fitness bootcamp.

Moreover, the chart helped my interactions with my team tremendously. Whenever I would get frustrated at somebody, before I unloaded those frustrations, I would first check my dashboard to see if I had been taking care of myself. I often found in those situations that I hadn’t, and it was a signal to me that I should go for a run before I said anything to anybody.

I have found the dashboard so valuable, I have continued the practice. Here’s what this year’s spreadsheet looks like:

Self-Care Spreadsheet

Notice the different colors indicating whether or not I did a practice that week. Here’s what the corresponding line chart looks like:

Self-Care Dashboard

As you can see, the four-week running average is a better indicator of my state of self-care at any point in time than my number for that week or of the overall average. You can also see that I’ve been doing very well with my practices over the past few months. If I were to compare this chart to last year’s numbers, you would see that I’m taking much better care of myself this year than last.

I’ve made the Google Spreadsheet template available for anyone to copy and adapt as he or she sees fit. I’ve also put together a screencast that quickly walks through how to use and customize the dashboard. Post your questions or thoughts below, and if you decide to use or adapt it, please let me know, as I’d love to hear how it’s working for you!

Kangaroo Court: A Tool for Constructive Feedback

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

One of my personal challenges at Groupaya was not overwhelming my team with negative feedback. I was generally proud of the quality of my team’s work, and I think I was decent at expressing that pride in the form of positive, constructive feedback. However, I also generally had a long list of nitpicks, and I never felt the need to hold any of that back. In my mind, my positive feelings far outweighed my criticism. However, I often had difficulty communicating that.

My friend, Alex Kjerulf, is a happiness guru, and he speaks often about negativity bias. Humans are biologically more attuned to negative than to positive feedback, between three-to-five times as much. To compensate for negativity bias, you need to share positive feedback three-to-five times as often as negative.

I tried to do this, and I was sometimes even successful, but there was a deeper issue. Rebecca Petzel once said to me, “You’re the most positive person in the company, but somehow, your negative feedback stings more than anyone else’s.” My problem wasn’t necessarily quantity, it was quality.

I tried a lot of different things, and nothing seemed to work well. Out of desperation, I decided to invent a game inspired by kangaroo courts.

Kangaroo courts are essentially arbitrary forms of justice. In government, they describe a corrupt judicial system. In sports, however, they’re used as a way to enforce unwritten rules and to build team camaraderie.

A team’s veterans are usually the arbiters of justice, although the coaches sometimes play this role as well. Veteran leaders might fine their teammates for something ludicrous, such as wearing a really loud tie, but they also dole out justice for disciplinary reasons, such as showing up late to practice. Fines are often used to fund team parties.

I decided that Groupaya needed a kangaroo court. If I could attach a number to my feedback, then the magnitude of my feedback would become more clear. For nitpicks, I would dole out small fines. For major problems, I would dole out larger ones.

Given that we were not as liquid as professional athletes, I figured that an arbitrary point system would serve our purposes. Since we were using points instead of money, I figured we could actually reward people as well as penalize them. Since we had a flat, collaborative culture, I decided that anybody in the company should be able to both dole out and take away points. And if we were going to go through the effort of giving and taking points away, we might as well keep track of them.

On June 13, 2012, I created a page on our internal wiki outlining the “rules” of the game, and I announced the game on our internal microblog. I then modeled the game by docking two points from myself, one each for misspelling two people’s names in different places. (This is a huge detail pet peeve of mine, given that we’re in a relational business.)

The game lay dormant for a few days, then on June 17, 2012, I gave and took away points four additional times:

Eugene: +5 to Kristin for her June 14 addition on Charter markers to the Groupaya Way wiki. It was great information, and it showed that she’s developing an instinct for how to use wikis in-the-flow. Love it!

Eugene: -1 to Kristin for being overly motherly with Rebecca

Eugene: -1 to Rebecca for comparing me and Kristin to her parents.

Eugene: +1 to Eugene for unintentionally conceiving of a way to get people to learn how to use the wiki.

Out of the six times I delivered justice, three were “real,” and the rest were jokes. Two of the three “real” instances were me penalizing myself, and the other was me awarding points rather than taking them away.

At this point, our ops guru, Natalie Dejarlais, figured out what was going on, and contributed her own dry sense of humor:

Natalie: +1 to Rebecca for not comparing me to her parents.

Rebecca and Kristin Cobble, my Groupaya co-founder, were mystified. Rebecca, ever the competitive one, was miffed that she was down a point in a game that she hadn’t signed up for. Keep in mind, all of this was happening online. We had not seen each other or talked over the phone, so I had not had the chance to explain the game verbally.

Shortly afterward, I left town for a client, and while I was gone, Natalie explained the game to Rebecca and Kristin at coworking. They got it, both started playing, and the game took on a life of its own. Everyone played. We gave and took points away from each other and ourselves about 40 times a month.

Lots of them were silly, where we were simply goofing off and having fun with each other. Many were concrete and substantial. Unexpectedly, the vast majority of these were positive. I had designed the game to be a safe way to give negative feedback, but it had emerged as a way of celebrating each other’s successes, of tracking what we were doing well, and of lightening the overall mood.

At some point, I decided that the points winner each month should win a trophy (a Surfer Obama bobblehead doll I picked up in Hawaii along with a tiara that Natalie contributed to disincentivize me from trying to win) and that the points would reset each month. We had a monthly awards ceremony, where Natalie would blast the theme song from Rocky, and Kristin would pretend that she didn’t love Surfer Obama. (When she finally won, she confessed her true feelings.)

The game had its desired effect in terms of improving the overall learning culture in our organization, but its most important contribution was joy and humor. I often pondered writing a mobile app so that we could extend the game to our larger network, as we often found ourselves granting points to our external colleagues and clients, who never got to actually see them (or, more importantly, win Surfer Obama).

I’m strongly considering introducing some variation of the game into Changemaker Bootcamp, as I’m looking for creative ways of introducing more concrete feedback so that participants can track their progress. Amy Wu, Groupaya’s brilliant designer, recently told me that she had adapted the game for her kids to great effect. If you decide to adopt or adapt the game for your team or organization, let me know in the comments below! I’d love to hear about it!

Beginner’s Mind and the Pace of Learning

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Earlier this week, I was watching videos of some of Groupaya’s strategy meetings last year. I was looking for video clips of interesting group dynamics that I could share at Changemaker Bootcamp, but I found myself instead reliving some challenging moments from last year.

Rebecca had set the tone of that meeting by having us celebrate our highlights. This was a good thing, because I spent most of the rest of the meeting talking about what I thought we were doing wrong.

In the midst of my meeting-long, blistering critique, I emerged from my agitation to express a momentary, but authentic feeling of self-compassion and perspective. I said, “I’m not actually unhappy about where we are right now. I think we’ve accomplished some amazing things. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is marathon, not a sprint. If we have to adjust some of our expectations accordingly, then let’s do it.”

Kristin let out a visceral sigh in reaction to this, so much so that I was taken aback at first. “Thank you for saying that,” she said when I looked at her questioningly. “That is so true.”

As it turns out, she had been carrying the same weight that I had, already heavy from her own expectations and exacerbated by what I was adding. “When you run a marathon, you take water from the water station, and you take a moment to replenish yourself,” she said. “You can’t finish otherwise. When you sprint, you don’t have time for that, but you don’t need it either.”

Starting Groupaya made me a much better consultant, largely because of moments like these. It’s easy to say stuff like this to others, but it’s incredibly hard to do in practice. When you are a doer who feels urgency — self-imposed or otherwise — you pressure yourself to go, go, go. Sometimes it’s merited, often it’s not. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to maintain a sense of perspective, to manage your expectations accordingly, to push yourself without killing yourself, and to take the moments you need to replenish.

Now, I find myself at an interesting confluence where I’m needing to take these lessons to heart and where I’m relearning them all over again.

My one leftover project from Groupaya has been helping the Hawaii Community Foundation with a culture change process. I often complain about how foundations don’t move fast enough, and so I find myself in an unusual position of constantly reminding the great folks there to slow down. It’s been a new challenge for me to think about designing water stations as part of my process, giving my client a chance to replenish while reminding them that there’s 20 miles still to go.

Similarly, Changemaker Bootcamp has been a revelation for me. It’s really helped me understand what I know that is valuable, and what I’d like to help others learn. Figuring out how to stage that has been a huge challenge.

What’s unexpectedly helped me throughout all of this has been my photography class. Our teacher, Lauren Crew, runs a very loose class, focusing on immersion and discussion. I love to learn this way. It plays to a lot of my strengths, but it can easily get overwhelming. Every assignment feels like a huge stretch, and you become viscerally aware of what you don’t know and what you can’t do.

Despite everything I know about learning and pacing, despite the confidence I have in my ability to learn, and despite the joy I get from being immersed in a learning process, I have felt a lot of doubt and self-consciousness throughout this whole process (and it’s only been two weeks). What the heck?! I’m a beginner taking an extension school class with a bunch of other incredibly nice beginners with a great, supportive teacher. Why am I getting frustrated at not taking Pulitzer Prize-caliber photos every time I click on the shutter?

Our assignment this past week was about fear. Lauren has encouraged us to start each assignment by being literal, but because of my outsized expectations, I’ve had a lot of difficulty doing that. It’s required a lot of discipline to stop conceptualizing and to start shooting, to recognize that being iterative will work much better than obsessing about perfection on the first try.

I wanted to capture my fear of being placed in a box, of being artificially labelled and constrained. (This explains a lot about my career choices.) A visual that came to mind was the fountain in front of the Embarcadero Center, which consists of lots of boxy tunnels contorting in all sorts of directions. I had wanted to recruit a friend to be a model, but my limited schedule was going to make that very difficult. Besides, it made more sense for me to be in the picture, since this was about my fear, so I decided to do a self-portrait.

I shot for about 20 minutes, and I felt anxious the entire time. I had wanted to come on a foggy morning, but the best opportunity I had was in the middle of the afternoon when the light can be challenging. There were waterfalls everywhere, which limited where I could place my GorillaPod and compose my shot.

The absolute worst part of that whole experience was being my own model. I wasn’t just posing for a cheesy headshot. I was contorting my body in ways that are not flattering, and I was doing it repeatedly, since I had to check the shot and set it up anew each time. To make matters worse, there were several people there taking photos of the fountain, and it seemed like every one of them stopped what they were doing to stare at me.

I’ve been intentionally learning in public, posting my photos on Flickr for all to see. I got a shot that was fine for classroom purposes, but I felt incredibly self-conscious about sharing this particular one publicly, something that hasn’t generally been an issue for me. Part of it was that I didn’t feel like I had successfully executed my vision, but the bigger part was simply not like to see myself in this picture.

Still, I forced myself to push through the discomfort and share. On Facebook, my friends (as usual) expressed support, but my friend, Justin, also asked me to go into more detail about what I was unhappy about. In response to my critique, he decided to play with the image on his own to see if he could get it closer to my original vision.

My original picture is on the left, Justin’s version is on the right. You can see how he manipulated the photo to create a much greater sense of being boxed in while also drawing out the details in my face. He also shared the exact Lightroom settings he used, so that I could replicate his changes and build on them.

Despite all my anxiety, here’s what I loved about this whole ordeal:

  • I loved the feeling of making progress, to know that I’m getting better. To even be at the point where I have a vision for a photograph is huge progress. Furthermore, I understood how to manipulate my camera in ways that I didn’t even a few months ago.
  • I loved the feeling of challenging myself, of living in my discomfort. This process of stretching myself and of being uncomfortable is what’s going to make me better.
  • I loved how learning in public brought much needed support, but more importantly, new insights and a better product. Ward Cunningham often describes the essence of wikis as putting something out there and coming back to it later and discovering that someone has made it better. This experience is not just limited to wikis, and if you’ve ever experienced this firsthand, you know how wonderful and addictive it is.

Learning can be a joyful process, but it can also be a brutal one. My photography class has reminded me of both of these things, and it’s made me much more conscious about how better to support learning, both for others and for myself.

Photo (top) by Dominik Golenia. CC BY-ND 2.0.