learning – Page 5 – Eugene Eric Kim

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!

March Progress Report on Balance and Impact

Published March 2, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

At the start of this year, I reported that I had left Groupaya in pursuit of greater balance and impact. In addition to closing out some client work, my plan was to pause, reflect, and play.

Two months into 2013, I would say I’ve had moderate success. My life is certainly more balanced than it was the past few years, but it’s only been moderately more spacious. It’s been very easy for me to fill up my time, as I predicted it would. Overall, I’ve been good about filling that time with life as opposed to “work,” but “work” has crept in a bit more than I would like. For example:

My friends at Code for America reached out to me at the beginning of the year to see if I could work with its 2013 Fellows on team dynamics. I’m on its advisory board, and I love the work it does. How could I resist?
I finished my obligations for the Delta Dialogues, but then agreed to participate in two additional meetings to share what we learned, both of which required prep.
In early February, I had a two-day board meeting for the Leadership Learning Community. I always enjoy these meetings, because I love spending time with the other board members, but it requires a lot of brain cycles.

I could have said no to some of these things, but they haven’t been the main reason for my lack of spaciousness. The main reason has been poor boundary management with my remaining client obligations. Ironically, I’ve been missing a lot of the structures from Groupaya that enabled me to maintain those boundaries. I left the company to create more space for myself, but that also meant losing some structures that enabled me to maintain that space. In particular:

I no longer have a team and operational infrastructure supporting my work. A lot of this stuff is mundane (like invoicing and scheduling), but time-consuming. I’m also missing some of our team accountability practices, which helped keep me disciplined in my obligations.
I stopped maintaining a regular work schedule, which made it all too easy for obligations to pile up rather than distribute evenly. I’ve also missed some of our team’s practices that helped me maintain a strong rhythm throughout the week, like our weekly checkins and our virtual water cooler.
I eliminated my Wednesday Play Days. I figured that all of my time right now is supposed to be play time, so I didn’t need to carve out a formal day for this. I was wrong.
I stopped time-tracking. I have historically avoided time-tracking like the plague. But at Groupaya, I actually became one of the strongest advocates and enforcers of the practice, because it enabled us to quantify our progress in many areas. We learned a ton from the practice, and it helped us improve many of our processes. But when I left, I immediately reverted. One of the reasons you leave an organization is so that you don’t have to do stuff like this. This was a mistake. As it turned out, tracking time is a wonderful way to keep you focused and to help you maintain your boundaries.

The good news is, I don’t need to be part of an organization to implement any of these structures. Now that I’ve felt their absence, I’m slowly bringing these structures back into my life, tweaking how I implement them to better fit my current circumstances.

The better news is, I’ve managed to retain other structures from my time at Groupaya that have enabled me to create more space in my life. (I’ll share these structures in another blog post.)

The best news is, I’m much more relaxed these days, my life feels much more balanced, and I’m learning a lot from unexpected places. (Again, more details to come in a future blog post.) Highlights have included:

My work! (I know, I know, I’ve got problems.) I’m excited about a workshop I’m co-organizing with Rebecca Petzel next week on how consulting can have a more transformational impact on the nonprofit sector. And I’m super excited by the culture change work I’m doing with the Hawaii Community Foundation. I’ve been able to do these projects slowly and spaciously, which makes them all the more fulfilling. And I’m being disciplined about not taking on any more client work as I finish up these projects.
I spent a week with my older sister and her family (including my two awesome nephews) in Cincinnati.
I’m seeing and reconnecting with lots of friends. I’ve been negligent about this the past few years, and it’s felt really good to make time for people I care about.
I’m cooking more.
I’m reading a ton, including two novels, which has been great, because I almost never read fiction anymore. I love to read, and I know my life is appropriately spacious when I’m doing a lot of it.
I’m running and hiking more, and I’m starting to play basketball again regularly.
I’ve started to get more serious about photography.
I’m taking care of a lot of real-life stuff. I’m examining and implementing systems for everything from financials to information management. This will require several more months to complete, which makes me wonder how anyone manages to do this stuff without taking extended time away from work.
I’m learning and re-learning a lot about myself. I’m still trying to make sense of what I’ve learned over the past ten years, and I don’t have clarity yet on what I want to do in the future, but I see the fog starting to dissipate.

I’m having to tweak things here and there, and I miss my old team a lot, but beyond that, life is great.

Five Lessons from my Nephew on Learning

Published February 1, 2013 by Eugene Eric Kim

I spent last week in Cincinnati with my sister, brother-in-law, and nephews, Elliott and Benjamin. I hadn’t seen them in a while, and I just wanted to spend some quality time with them. Despite the frigid cold, it was restful and wonderful. I spent a lot of time in particular hanging out with Elliott while I was there, sitting in on his second-grade class, watching him practice cello and hockey, and trash talking our way through a marathon game of Parcheesi.

Elliott’s a sweet, goofy, playful eight-year old, easily distracted by the world and its many pleasures, but full of beautiful insights. I suppose it’s not surprising how creative and thoughtful he is, given his two musician parents, but he often astonishes me with his observations. A few years ago, I was reading him a bedtime story about a tree dying in the forest (why are children’s books so depressing?!). Midway through, he suddenly stopped me, and asked me to repeat a line. “That’s so beautiful,” he said after listening to the line again. And it was! But I wouldn’t have expected someone his age to pick up on that. Heck, I hadn’t picked up on it.

Elliott’s in the enrichment program in his class, and his teachers rave about him, but he’s not book smart in the way my sisters and I were growing up. We were Class-A nerds, perfect at spelling and math. We picked things up in the classroom easily, and we loved to read and study on our own. Elliott’s good, but not great at those things. His mind clearly works in different ways. I’ve been able to watch his learning process in a punctuated way over time, and on this trip, I saw a lot of things that both surprised me and reinforced some of my thoughts on learning and pedagogy. Here are five things I learned.

1. You can practice falling.

I grew up loving sports, and Elliott took to sports at an early age as well. I loved sharing that with him, and I bought him his first glove and basketball. But then he took an unexpected turn. He decided that hockey was his favorite sport.

I’m from L.A. I didn’t watch or play hockey growing up, even when Gretzky joined the Kings. Even though I went to school in the northeast, where they have silly events with vaguely insidious names like “Beanpot,” I never took to the sport. I didn’t know a puck from a crease.

When Elliott became a hockey nut, our relationship was suddenly reversed. Now he was the one sharing with me something that he loved, something that I knew nothing about, but that I wanted to learn because of him. My friend, Eugene, was telling me recently about a similar experience he was going through with his son, and how much he was enjoying it. It’s a special experience.

As part of my ongoing immersion, I watched my very first hockey practice last week, and I saw something that blew my mind. In hockey, you practice falling.

How brilliant is that? We were not meant to move our bodies at breakneck speeds on hard, frictionless surfaces, especially with other bodies simultaneously trying to bodycheck us off the ice. Even the most skilled skater is going to fall many times throughout the course of a game. And so rather than put their blind faith in the athleticism of their players, coaches teach players how to fall, and they have them practice it over and over again. It made me wonder what the equivalent of falling (not failing) was in my work, and how I could practice it more intentionally.

2. Improvement can take time to see.

My brother-in-law is a cellist, and Elliott started taking cello lessons when he was three. Both my sister and brother-in-law are steeped in the Suzuki method, which emphasizes learning by listening, playing in groups, and space. (More on space below.)

Elliott has always had a natural sense of rhythm and an affinity to music, but I’m not sure he’s passionate about cello. Maybe that will come over time. I know for certain that he doesn’t like to practice it, which makes him like just about every other little boy in the world.

Nevertheless, he’s been playing for five (!) years now. I’ve gotten to watch him practice every time I’ve visited. He’s not any more enthused than he was when he started, but he’s definitely better. I can see that viscerally. I doubt that he can, and I wish that he could.

Incremental improvement takes time to see. You notice it immediately when you’ve been away from it, but it’s just about impossible to see when you’re living it every day. Elliott sometimes got frustrated by his “lack of progress,” both with the cello and with hockey, but he simply wasn’t able to see the amazing amount of progress he has made.

It reminded me of my own frustrations with Groupaya last year, when I felt like we weren’t learning fast enough. When I was able to step back, look at the actual data, and take a long view, I could see how mistaken I was. Learning takes time, and progress is not always immediately visible.

3. Space matters.

Elliott’s cello teacher, Ms. Nadine, is a master of space. She knew that I would be sitting in on his lesson, and when I walked into her practice room, she already had a chair ready for me… behind Elliott, so that he couldn’t look at me during the lesson. Her room was designed to eliminate distractions so that her students could focus on two things: their instruments and their teacher.

I was similarly impressed by Elliott’s school. (More on this below.) His classroom was designed in really smart ways, redefining what most people understand “classroom-style” to mean.

The class was split up into small groups, facing each other rather than the teacher. (His teacher later told me that she would rather divide the class into even smaller groups, but couldn’t due to space constraints.) There were folder pouches on the back of each chair, allowing the students to have whatever they needed closely on-hand, so they wouldn’t be distracted by large bags lying around all over the place. Everything on the walls and on the floor had meaning behind their placement.

As I said earlier, Elliott is easily distracted, yet it was amazing how much of an impact environment had on his ability to focus. I have long believed in the importance of this, and yet, my experience in Cincinnati has me wanting to reassess my workspace for ways that it can help me perform better.

4. We could learn a lot from existing schools.

I think there are a lot of problems with our school system. I’ve worked in education, both formally as part of my consulting practice and informally as a volunteer. Everyone has horror stories to share, many from personal experience. And yet, it always makes me cringe a little when I hear categorical rejections of our current ways of learning.

What I’ve known from my previous work and what I got to see firsthand last week is that there are a lot of good things happening in today’s schools, stuff that folks in other fields could learn a lot from. It wasn’t just the space (although the classrooms at Elliott’s school were designed more thoughtfully than most office spaces I’ve seen). It was also the teaching, the curriculum, the pedagogy, and the work practices.

I’ve spent so much of the past 10 years thinking about how groups learn, playing with different ideas and looking for models that work. One place I haven’t spent much time examining is our current school system, probably because I carry the same biases that I described above. I’m reconsidering that. I think there’s a whole lot more I could learn about learning simply by spending more time in schools, especially at the elementary level.

5. Learning should be joyful.

I’ve been doing a lot of culture change work with groups over the past few years. Something that’s come up repeatedly in different places has been the desire to reintroduce joy as a cultural goal. There is something primal and important about joy, and it’s a little bit sad how often we as adults need to be reminded (or worse, persuaded) of this.

Whenever I see both of my nephews, they give me a refresher course on this. This is their nature. They derive joy from connection, from achievement, from play, from learning, from love. It is a beautiful thing to watch and experience, and I’m lucky to have such wonderful teachers.