March Progress Report on Balance and Impact

Posted on Published 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:

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.

Virtual Beverage De-siloization Hack

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) is a great community around reinventing management. My friend, Chris Grams, is one of the community builders there, and one of my past projects (the Wikimedia Strategic Planning process) was a finalist in its Management 2.0 competition.

A few weeks ago, the MIX decided to harness its own community onto itself, hosting a Hack the MIX Hackathon. Chris pinged me about it, and so I started poking around to see what people were saying.

There were lots of great ideas, but it didn’t feel like much of a hackathon, because it felt like many were treating this process as way to propose things for somebody else to implement. Hacking is all about doing, and there were already a great community  and a plethora of ideas that were ripe for the picking.

So I decided to contribute a hack that I would also do. I discovered ideas posted by Aaron Anderson, a professor at San Francisco State University’s College of Business, and Susan Resnick West, a professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, that really resonated with me. They were all about implementation and about building community.

I decided I wanted to do both of what they suggested: get to know people in the community better (and Susan and Aaron in particular) and look for excuses to actually try some of these hacks. So I invited Susan and Aaron to a virtual coffee over Google Hangout (my virtual beverage de-siloization hack), and I promised the MIX community that we would share what we discussed with everybody.

We spoke this morning, and it was delightful. Here’s the video:

Here are three brief takeaways:

  • It was super fun getting to know Aaron and Susan, who are both doing cool stuff and who are both great people. Both Aaron and Susan have their curriculums available online.
  • Susan’s story about an Annenberg Innovation Lab hack (the Think-Do process) was a finalist in a previous MIX competition, and it seemed like something we’d like to experiment with. So we’re going to try it, hacking the hack as we see fit, and we’ll share what we learn. If you want to play too, add your name in the comments here or in the comments section below.
  • The MIX site is a community hub, but that doesn’t mean that all community activity needs to happen there. Furthermore, not everyone has to agree on something before you do something. We showed that by using Google Hangouts to get to know each other and to brainstorm ways to play together. We’ll now go back to the MIX to share what we did.

On Sourcing Quotes and the Wikimedia Way

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

This morning, I came across this Charlie Parker quote that I really loved:

“Master your instrument, master the music, then forget all that bullshit and just play.”

My first instinct was to tweet it. My second, more practiced instinct, was to check the source first. It’s really not that hard to at least do a quick check, and I’ve discovered lots of misattributed quotes this way.

A quick search surfaced a bunch of unattributed variants on that quote, as well as this entry from Wikiquote:

“You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.” –As quoted in Acting Is a Job: Real-life Lessons About the Acting Business (2006) by Jason Pugatch, p. 73; this statement has occurred with many different phrasings, including: “Learn the changes, then forget them.”

A book on acting is not the most credible source, probably no better than the blog post above. But at least it’s the start of a trail, one that anyone can follow to the end, if they so desire.

The ethos of sourcing facts is theoretically easier in this connected age, but the reality is that our connectivity seems to discourage it. We read funny or provocative things that speak to us, we click once, and boom, we’ve instantaneously shared it with hundreds of our followers without giving any thought to whether or not it’s true. That’s a problem.

Furthermore, social media tools seem to be actively evolving to discourage sourcing. I was guilted into this practice of sourcing-before-sharing after reading a rant by Evan Prodromou, who pointed out that a quote that was being widely and rapidly shared was actually misattributed.

Here’s the problem: Even though he posted it publicly somewhere, I can’t find it. It’s not on his blog, and it’s not on Status.net (the company he founded, which very much values persistent data), although he alludes to the rant there. Which means that he posted it on Facebook or Google Plus, which means that I can just about forget about ever finding it, since neither of those services seem to care about making posts persistent and findable. (Read a similar criticism that Kellan Eliott-McCrea had about Twitter.) Which means that this knowledge trail, minor though it may be, has been unnecessarily broken.

This is yet another reason why I appreciate Wikimedia so much. There is a deeply embedded ethos in that community around sourcing truth. Sometimes, this ethos surfaces some quirky challenges around epistemology,  such as the recent Philip Roth affair, but even situations like these only serve to make us smarter and more self-aware.

The wiki tool enables this ethos to some extent, but the reality is that its source is cultural, not technical, and the community is trying to apply this ethos to all forms of knowledge, not just encyclopedic. No one else is doing this. That’s unfortunate, because we need a lot more of it.

Delta Dialogues

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My biggest project last year was around water issues in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. That region is critically important to California, as it provides water for 25 of the 38 million people who live here — two-thirds of our population. This water is responsible for an estimated $400 billion of California’s economy — 20 percent of our GDP.

But there is much, much more at stake than that. There are almost a thousand different species of plants and wildlife in the Delta, much of it native, some of it endangered. California’s salmon industry is dependent on sufficient water flow in the Delta.

Then there are the people who make up that community: a half million people, a half million acres of nutrient-rich farmland, a quarter of a million jobs. These numbers barely scratch the surface of the story of that community: the way of life, the beauty of the region, and the wonderful people who live there.

I fell in love with the Delta while working on this project. This was the only thing that could have happened, because I love California, and I don’t see how anyone who loves California could not also love the Delta.

This simple fact was what made our project possible. Everyone involved loves the Delta. With all of the vicious fighting, name-calling, and litigation in that region over the past half century, it can be hard to see this.

Our team at Groupaya along with my friend and mentor, Jeff Conklin of CogNexus Group, spent much of last year designing and facilitating a process to build shared understanding and rebuild trust in the region. We called the process, Delta Dialogues (one of Kristin Cobble’s many brilliant contributions). I previously wrote a guest post about the project on the California Civic Innovations Project blog, where you can read a brief description of what we did and why we did it.

We hired my friend, Joe Mathews, journalist extraordinaire, California editor of Zocalo Public Square, and coauthor of California Crackup, to observe and write about the Delta Dialogues. He blogged regularly at our project website, and he wrote an amazing wrap-up piece, which we just released last Wednesday.

Go read it now. It’s wonderful: full of characters and color and context and learnings.

It’s also no-holds barred. We didn’t put any restrictions on him, other than a ground rule that participants requested, which was the ability to vet quotes before they were published. (Saying “we didn’t put any restrictions on him” suggests that we had the ability to put restrictions on him in the first place. Anyone who knows Joe knows that this would have been impossible anyway, so we didn’t bother trying.)

So Joe’s account is not all roses and candy. There’s some stuff there that isn’t pretty, specifically his descriptions of some disconnects on our team and of a poorly facilitated meeting in July, which was particularly inopportune in many respects.

Because I left Groupaya, I won’t be participating in the second phase of the Delta Dialogues. It’s one of the many things that made my departure so difficult, especially since we have a lot of unfinished business to attend to. However, it does give me an opportunity to do something that I probably would not have done if I hadn’t left: Write an account of why we designed things the way we did, what we learned, what we would have done differently, what we would have done the same. I will definitely be writing more about that July meeting.

Hopefully, people will find this valuable. At minimum, I know I’ll find it cathartic.

Kristin, Rebecca Petzel, and I will also do a live version of this from 3-5pm on Wednesday, February 20 in San Francisco. If you’re interested in attending, RSVP here for now.

While I tee up my new posts, you can read my previous writings on the project on the Groupaya blog:

If you have specific questions or topics you’d like to see me discuss, please leave a comment below.

Five Tips for Facilitating Power Dynamics

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My last remaining client is a small organization having a collective conversation about the culture it wants to have moving forward. One question that has come up repeatedly is: How can you have open, authentic, courageous conversations with your boss (or your boss’s boss) in the room?

As is often the case with my work, this is both a long-term question for the organization and an immediate process challenge, because we want the staff to be able to have an open, authentic, courageous conversation about this very topic with their bosses (and their bosses’s bosses) in the room. Not surprisingly, this has been a difficult challenge right from the start.

We’ve divided the entire organization into working groups of eight people, each representing different functions and levels across the organization. Each group has one member of the top-level leadership team participating. In other words, there are groups with young, administrative assistants in the room with C-level leadership and every position in-between, and we’re asking them to have open, sometimes difficult conversations in their groups around culture. Crazy, right?! How is it possible to have a safe conversation this way?

Furthermore, we’re not facilitating these conversations ourselves. Each group has a staff facilitator, someone who has demonstrated a proclivity for this role, but is not necessarily experienced at it. Rebecca Petzel and I are coaching the facilitators along the way, but we’re not actually in the room for these conversations.

These facilitators have been doing a great job so far, but some of them have found it challenging to deal with this power dynamic in the room. Several people have suggested removing the top-level leadership team from these conversations, something we considered from the start and something that we may still do.

Regardless of what we choose to do, the bottom line is that managing power dynamics is a fundamental, pervasive challenge, and that the only way to deal with it is to practice.

It’s not always about structural power — having your boss or a funder or a parent in the room, for example. Power comes in many forms. There’s relational power, for example. “Jane isn’t C-level, but she’s tight with the CEO, and I might as well be talking directly to the CEO when she’s in the room.”

Or there’s hierarchy that emerges from expertise. For example, I’ve seen many groups and even whole organizations held hostage by the one geek in the room, because everyone else is intimidated by that person’s knowledge about technology.

In many of these cases, the power structures are actually appropriate. If I have to get my car fixed, I’d better be listening and — to some extent — deferring to people who know about and understand cars better than me. I may not be paid to think broadly or deeply about strategy, but the CEO is, and so it makes sense for me to defer to the CEO to some extent. Then again, there are also studies that show that we defer authority to the people who simply talk more than anyone else, regardless of the substance of what they are actually saying.

The key question in all of these cases is, how much is the right amount? How do I engage with the power in the room while keeping my own power intact?

I decided to consult with Kristin Cobble to help me think through some of the specific challenges my client is facing. We had a fantastic tactical conversation, but we also talked a lot about the issues at a higher level, drawing from our previous experiences. There were so many great nuggets from our conversation, I asked her if she would have the conversation a second time with me and let me video it. Here it is:

Here are five key takeaways:

  1. We discussed a lot of tools and techniques, but at their core are the following principles: Name the dynamic, and encourage the group to reflect on it. Sometimes, naming the dynamic is enough. Other times, you need to find ways to break the dynamic in order to enable people to have this conversation.
  2. In our conversation, we used the words “facilitator,” “dominator,” and “dominated” to describe the different roles that emerge. I wish we had use David Kantor’s language instead: “observer,” “mover,” and “follower.” What you can do depends very much on the role you are playing.
  3. So much of your ability to practice naming and breaking these dynamics effectively, regardless of role, depends on your own self-awareness. This is where the type of coaching that Kristin practices is extremely helpful. Ed Batista, an executive and leadership coach, has a nice blog about this kind of work.
  4. The fallback solution for situations like this is to remove the power from the room. That can be a short-term bandage, but it won’t lead to success in the long-term. There are lots of great practices for breaking up the dynamic while still keeping everyone in the room.
  5. That said, there are no magic solutions. This stuff is hard, and it’s fundamental. It requires constant intention, attention, and practice. It’s inherently  awkward, uncomfortable, and messy. Trying to circumvent the mess will lead to failure. You have to dive right in, and you can’t be hard on yourself when it’s painful. If it’s not painful, you’re not doing it right.