Groupaya

A web site for a new company called Groupaya quietly cropped up last week. If you read the first blog post, you’ll see that I founded it with Kristin Cobble, and that Rebecca Petzel is part of our little cohort. I did a bit of explaining over there, and I’ll be doing much more over the coming weeks. What I’d like to do here is tell a more personal story about why Groupaya came to be and what it means for me moving forward.

Leading Change

2010 was a great and a challenging year for me professionally. My professional reputation had crossed some threshold where I had a steady stream of projects coming in, and the projects were getting bigger, harder, and more meaningful. I was also dissatisfied and completely burnt-out.

Blue Oxen Associates should have failed back in 2003, shortly after I had started it. We had no clients, a misguided strategy, and lots of debt. My cofounder had just left the company, and I felt very alone. We survived because of faith (both in ourselves and from others), because we worked like the dickens, and because we were very, very lucky. That survival process is a great teacher, but it comes at a personal cost, and if you’re not careful, you never heal.

As well as things were going in 2010, I wanted more. I was getting work opportunities, but I didn’t feel like I was fully empowered. I had big ideas about possibilities, and I was gradually moving toward those, but it was too slow, and I was exhausted from seven years of scrapping.

So I started creating space for myself so that I could think about what I really wanted and what I could do to get there. It was the healing process that I had put off for years. As I got clarity, I created new structures for myself, and the cycle of healing and clarity reinforced itself. One thing became very apparent very quickly: I was ready for a big change. I just didn’t know what that change should be.

That’s when beautiful, reliable serendipity took over.

Courage and Vision

In 2009, Pete Leyden, a journalist and entrepreneur who had been one of the founders of Wired, was returning to San Francisco after a stint in D.C. as director of New Politics Institute. He had this brilliant, wildly ambitious idea of combining the best of Silicon Valley and the web with a more traditional think tank as a way of revolutionizing public policy. He called his new company Next Agenda.

Part of his vision entailed bringing the best tools and processes for both face-to-face and online collaboration into a single, coherent practice. He started recruiting a team to help him make this happen. Henry Poole, one of Blue Oxen’s advisors, suggested that he talk to me.

Through his friend and former colleague, Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, Pete also discovered Kristin Cobble. Kristin was an organizational and leadership development superstar. She had started her career at Innovation Associates (Peter Senge‘s consulting firm), and she had served as the Director of Strategic Change at Banana Republic.

Several years ago, Kristin had started to formulate a vision of a large-scale, participatory process that would empower the people in this country to take ownership of our future. When Pete discovered her, she had just left Monitor Group to try and make this vision a reality. She called her new company, “Courion Group,” where “Courion” was a combination of “courage” and “vision,” values that she herself embodies.

I immediately bonded with Kristin. We shared strong values around group process and the future of the world, and we brought complementary lenses and experiences to our work. Plus, I simply admired the heck out of her abilities. She is a tremendously skilled coach, designer, and facilitator, and she has the ability to think through complex, systemic challenges quickly and deeply.

We spent a lot of time outside of Next Agenda talking about our respective philosophies around collaboration, coming to a much deeper shared understanding in the process. Kristin also became a valued friend and advisor, and I started leaning on her as I worked through my professional angst.

New Life

By April 2010, I was 99 percent sure that I would shut down Blue Oxen and pursue new opportunities, most likely at someone else’s organization. I was exhausted, I needed a break, and frankly, I was curious to know what sort of opportunities were out there. Then I got an unexpected email.

My friend, Scott McMullan, is responsible for partnerships for Google Apps. One of his customers (let’s call him “Harry”), then a CIO at a Fortune 500 company, wanted to explore an initiative for improving collaboration across his organization. It was a very big, very vague idea, and he was looking for a non-traditional thinking partner who understood collaboration deeply and who wasn’t afraid to play and take risks. Harry asked Scott if he knew anyone, and Scott generously mentioned me.

So Harry sent me an email. One energizing conversation later, I realized something about myself: As tired as I was, I still felt passionate about my work and my path. All it took was the right conversation with the right person to get excited again.

I knew that Harry was talking to other larger, more reputable firms. I also knew that we could do a better job than any of those firms. So I started putting together a team and a plan.

This was also an opportunity to start testing some of my structural changes. One of those was a requirement that I bring in a senior partner for all big projects. The first person who came to mind was Kristin, who, to my delight, agreed to join me.

Another change was an intention to create opportunities for people who were less experienced than me, but who were as passionate as I was about collaboration and who were hungry to learn.

I had recently met Rebecca Petzel at a tweet-up organized by Christina Jordan. I was literally on my way out the door when I met Rebecca, but she stuck out for three reasons. First, she had started a cohort in graduate school that called themselves “collaboration ninjas.” Second, she had moved to the Bay Area without a job because she was drawn by the people here and their purpose. Third, when I told her I was a collaboration consultant, she was absolutely delighted. She had no idea that such a job title actually existed!

We had coffee a few times, where I learned more about her work and her drive. In the process of putting together our team, I learned that Rebecca was thinking about transitioning from her job as community catalyst at Myoo Create. I told her about Harry, and I set up a meeting with Kristin. The three of us clicked, and the third member of our team was in place.

Groupaya

Kristin and I filled out the rest of our team from our network of colleagues, we made our pitch, and we got the gig. Thus began the best working experience of my life. We were working on a complex project in a large, global organization with strong leadership support. We had a superstar team in place that kept challenging my thinking and motivating me to work harder. Everyone on the client’s team was smart, great at execution, and simply good people.

Working with Kristin was just really generative. It broadened and deepened my thinking, and it emboldened me to step into my vision. It had a reverberating effect on the rest of my work and even my personal life. I was happier and more productive, and I felt a renewed passion for my work.

In September 2010, we decided to join forces. Rather than ask Kristin to join Blue Oxen Associates, I decided I wanted to create a new organization with her. I’ll explain why in a more detailed post on the Blue Oxen blog, but the short explanation is that I wanted a sense of closure and starting anew.

We’ve spent the better part of a year figuring out what we were going to do together, and we finally signed our partnership agreement last month (September 15, 2011). We’ll be documenting that part of our journey over the next few weeks on the Groupaya blog. It’s a great story, and it involves a lot of important people in our lives. I can’t wait to tell it.

And the journey continues. We’re still getting clear and moving forward, but we wanted to start sharing earlier rather than later. It’s part of our ethos of openness, and it’s also a great way for us to learn with a broader group of people.

In some ways, I feel like I’m getting married after living with someone for a long time. It’s special, but it’s not really new. Kristin and I have been working together for over two years now, we’ve been working with Rebecca for almost a year, and we’ve been operating as if we were already a company since the beginning of the year. That said, we have so much ahead of us, and I’m really excited to be making more and more people a part of this story.

You can follow the ongoing Groupaya saga at our blog, on Twitter (@groupaya), and on Facebook. I’d love to hear what you think!

Help Wikimedia Win the Management 2.0 Contest!

One of my past projects is a finalist for the Harvard Business Review / McKinsey Management 2.0 Challenge. I am recruiting Wikimedians and everybody who cares about open collaboration in general and the Wikimedia movement in particular to help us win.

From 2009-2010, I had the pleasure of designing and leading the Wikimedia strategic planning process. Not only was it the first strategic planning process of its kind for Wikimedia, it was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It was a completely open, movement-wide process, where anyone in the world could help co-create a five year plan for the movement as a whole. It was risky, it was scary, it was stressful, and it was exhilarating.

And it worked. Here’s what happened:

  • More than 1,000 people from all over the world contributed to the project
  • These volunteers created over 1,500 pages of high-quality, new content in over 50 languages
  • The year-long process resulted in five clear movement-wide priorities that has resulted in a movement-wide shift over the past year

If you’re a Wikimedian, you’ve seen and felt the renewed focus. If you’ve followed Wikimedia, you’ve read about initiatives that have emerged from the plan: closing the gender gap among contributors, a shifting emphasis on the Global South, and a slew of innovative features focused on strengthening community health. All of this came out of the planning process.

Why did it work?

It worked because we had an organization (the Wikimedia Foundation) that was committed to the cause and the process, even though it was an enormous risk for them. It worked because we had a great team. But the main reason it worked is that Wikimedia consists of an amazing, engaged, passionate community. We created a space, we invited people to come, and passionate, devoted, really smart people came and took care of the rest.

I’ve been wanting to tell the story of the process for a long time, but the usual thing happened: I got busy with cool new projects. Along the way, friends and colleagues have convinced me to get bits and pieces of the story out. Diana Scearce of the Monitor Institute has been a huge evangelist of the work, constantly putting me in front of philanthropic audiences to tell the story. The Leadership Learning Community (on whose board I serve) asked me to do a webinar on the topic last March, which garnered a great response.

Chris Grams has probably been our biggest advocate, and he’s the reason I’m writing this blog post today. Chris heard about our work through a mutual colleague, and he asked me to lead a webinar on the project for opensource.com. Something about our story stuck with him, and he kept finding ways to talk about us.

Several months ago, Chris told Philippe Beaudette (the facilitator of the project) and me about the Management 2.0 Challenge. As usual, I was too busy to contribute, but Chris pushed us. He wrote the initial story, and he kept kicking our butts until we fleshed it out. And so we did.

Today, they announced the top-20 finalists, and we’re one of them. The other 19 stories are really great, and it’s an honor to be nominated. But you know what, our story is the best of the bunch. We’re talking about Wikimedia, the greatest, free, volunteer-created repository of human knowledge that exists on the planet. We ought to win.

You can help us do that. The final judgement will be based on the feedback the story get, and how the story evolves as a result. So for starters, we need feedback. Please read the story. Rate it, comment on it, and ask as many people as possible to do the same.

Thanks for helping!

Photo by Ralf Roletschek. Cropped by Deniz Gultekin. Licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Quick Thoughts from the Network Funders Gathering, Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the Network of Network Funders gathering. It was my kind of gathering — great crowd, thoughtful conversations, strong design (a Diana Scearce staple), incredible stories.

Wanted to share three observations from yesterday:

Holding the tension. Working with networks from a position of traditional, institutional power is a tricky business. But doing it successfully is not about giving or wishing away that power. It’s about holding all the different tensions in balance: sharing control without losing it entirely, using your power to empower others, being open without putting your network at risk.

Fight the organizational mindset. The natural challenge for folks from foundations is fighting an organizational mindset. Folks here are doing pretty well, and they can do better. Focus on verbs, not nouns — network weaving vs network weavers, governing vs governance.

Own your power! There’s a psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. In short, people who are incompetent tend to overestimate their abilities; people who are highly competent tend to underestimate their abilities. Dunning-Kruger (the good kind) is rampant here.

The people in this room are really, really smart and well-versed in practice — moreso than many consultants I know. They need to step out of the mindset that they are only funders and step into their roles as thought leaders and action partners. Don’t pretend away the power dynamic. It will always be there. Channel it by sharing your knowledge in partnership with other stakeholders with humility, and continuing to do and to learn.

You can follow today’s conversation on Twitter by following the #netfunders hashtag.

Accountability in the Social Sector

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop wrote an internal memo recently that’s been making the rounds. In a nutshell, he writes that Nokia — the long-time market leader in mobile — is in danger of losing its position, and that it needs to change or die.

His memo is remarkable for its urgency and candor. It reminded me of a pivot I got to witness first-hand in 1995, when Microsoft admitted that it had missed the boat on the Internet. In the ensuing six months, it ended up dominating a market that it had been completely ignoring.

Reading the Nokia memo got me wondering about nonprofits and foundations. Has there ever been a similar pivot by a philanthropic foundation or a large, well-established nonprofit? Will we ever see one?

My guess is that the answer is no, although I’m anxious to hear stories to the contrary. There are no widely agreed upon ways of measuring accountability in the social sector, and thus, there is no accountability. The platform is burning, but everyone is on the same platform.

In contrast, in the for-profit world, winning and losing is defined by market share. Revenue may be problematic as a proxy for value, but it keep the whole system moving. Companies are accountable for what they’re doing now, and those that get complacent eventually lose.

In the absence of structural incentives for change, leadership becomes even more critical. Institutional philanthropy is in a wonderful position to be these leaders, and, by and large, they’re taking a pass. Foundations are wonderful at thinking deeply about very hard problems, but they are very poor at modeling change. (Last year, Monitor Institute published a great report suggesting how foundations can start doing this.) This is a sector that badly needs it.

I had an interesting Twitter exchange on this topic with Jeff Lindsay and Philip Neustrom, which motivated me to flesh out my thoughts here. Philip pointed me to Van Jones’s 2007 keynote speech at the Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp, where he talked about the importance of brutal honesty in the nonprofit sector. Read the whole speech; it’s wonderful.

Also, Sean Stannard-Stockton and Lucy Bernholz recently had a fascinating exchange on ways to introduce more accountability into the nonprofit sector.

Misconceptions about Collaboration

I was really annoyed when I read Cynthia Gibson’s piece on collaboration (which was also reposted by my friends at the Monitor Institute). I actually agreed with many of the points in the piece — the importance of clarity in roles and decision-making, for example, and the fact that collaboration is in service of a goal.

What bugged me was the erroneous premise. Why associate a “collaborative culture” with lack of clarity or regression to the mean? That’s not a collaborative culture, that’s a crappy culture.

“Collaboration” does not mean “non-hierarchical” or “consensus-driven.” It simply means two or more people working together toward a shared, bounded goal. You can do it well, or you can do it badly, but in both cases, you’re collaborating.

Let’s look at some of the most high-performing organizations in the world. Consider the New England Patriots, for example. Since 2001, they have 107 wins, 37 losses, and three Superbowl championships. Their organizational model? Hierarchical.

Or consider The French Laundry, widely acknowledged as one of the best restaurants in the world, with a large kitchen staff helmed by the superstar chef, Thomas Keller. Their organizational model? Hierarchical.

Or consider the Vienna Philharmonic, which is consistently considered one of the best symphony orchestras in the world. Organizational model? Hierarchical.

These are all hierarchical organizations that far surpass their peers because they are more collaborative.

Hierarchy describes a structure. Consensus describes a decision-making process. Neither is a measure of how effectively collaborative a group is.

I’m not just nit-picking language. These misconceptions are often the very reason why groups are led astray in the ways that Cynthia describes in her otherwise excellent piece.

With groups, it’s rarely a question of whether or not they’re collaborating. It’s almost always a question of whether they’re collaborating well. Having a “collaborative culture” doesn’t mean you’re collaborating with more people. It means you’re collaborating effectively. Every organization should be striving for this.

Sometimes, this means exploring alternative decision-making processes or figuring out ways to work with more people. You determine this through careful thought and experimentation. And that’s really the bottom line. I’ve never seen a group that was ineffective because it was “too collaborative.” Groups are generally ineffective because they don’t think carefully and they don’t work thoughtfully.