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

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passing the Torch

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

We hired Dana Reynolds as Groupaya’s administrative assistant in the middle of 2012. She was a recent college graduate who had all the attributes we were looking for — hard-working, competent, detail-oriented, learning-oriented. She was also ambitious and aggressive, two attributes I love and relate to. She wanted to become an organizational development consultant, and she was looking for a place where she could learn the trade.

This past year, as I started to explore what I wanted to do next, I thought a lot about Dana. I knew she was learning a tremendous amount from working closely with Kristin Cobble, my former business partner, but I also knew that actual practice opportunities were few and far between.

My new mission, in many ways, can be boiled down to this: Creating practice opportunities for people like Dana. Changemaker Bootcamp has been my primary experiment, but I’ve been playing with other ideas as well.

Dana participated in my most recent Changemaker Bootcamp pilot, and I got to see first-hand how much she’s grown in the year since I left Groupaya. After my exit interview with her, we discussed her career goals, and I saw how hungry she was for practice opportunities.

A few weeks later, an opportunity unexpectedly cropped up. Meghan Reilly of Code for America reached out to me and asked if I would facilitate their staff retreat. I explained that I no longer do that sort of thing, but I asked if she’d be open to having someone less experienced facilitate the retreat, with me serving as backup. She very graciously said yes.

We had done this together once before. Meghan had reached out to me two years earlier about the same thing. I had just started Groupaya with Kristin, and I saw it as an opportunity to give our associate, Rebecca Petzel, some practice with me as backup. Meghan graciously agreed, and Rebecca killed. The difference was that Rebecca was far more experienced then than Dana was now, and she had known a lot more about the organization and the civic innovation space. Having Dana do it was risky, and I did not take the faith that Meghan and the other leaders at Code for America had in me lightly.

So we prepared. Dana worked really hard and put in extra time to make sure she was ready.

The day before the retreat, Dana and I were supposed to meet to complete our preparation. At the last minute, I needed to find a different location for our meeting, so I reached out to Rebecca to see if we could use her coworking space. Rebecca said yes, and she also found time to sit in on part of our meeting, which was an unexpected bonus.

At one point, Dana asked me if she could keep time during the retreat on her cell phone. I opened my mouth to respond, but Rebecca jumped in beforehand. She took off her watch (which her best friend had given her), and she handed it to Dana.

She explained, “When I did their retreat two years ago, I realized that it was hard to keep time with my cell phone. I didn’t have a watch, so Eugene loaned me his. Now I want to loan you mine, so you can use it tomorrow.”

It was a beautiful gesture, and the spot where I was sitting may have gotten a little dusty at that point. Dana ended up doing an amazing job, far exceeding my expectations.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship this past year. I worked very hard to get to where I am, but the reality is that I was also incredibly lucky to have mentors who believed in me and who opened doors for me. The most important one — the one who set me on this path in the first place — passed away earlier this year. I feel a huge responsibility to create opportunities for others in the same way that he did for me.

I very much hope that my professional peers feel the same way. The kind of work that we do around collaboration is urgent and necessary, and a lot more people need to learn how to do it effectively. We have a responsibility not just to pass on our knowledge, but to create opportunities for others so that they can learn the way we did.

Seeing Rebecca “pass the watch” to Dana meant a lot to me, but what has been even more gratifying has been watching Rebecca work. This past year, she led a six-month collective learning process with a group of civic engagement funders that was innovative and transformative. There are only a handful of people in the world who could have done the work as skillfully as she did, and that handful does not include me.

I want to live in a world where there are thousands of people like Rebecca doing the kind of work that she’s been doing as well as she’s been doing it. Dana will get there, but we need many, many more. In order for this to happen, those of us who are already doing this kind of work have a responsibility to share what we’ve learned and to create opportunities for others so that a new, better generation can emerge.

A Funny Thing Happened the Other Day on the Internet…

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

This past week, I spent two days in Tiburon supporting my former colleague and bootcamper, Dana Reynolds, who was facilitating the Code for America staff retreat. Any time spent with the good folks at Code for America is going to be inspiring time, and I couldn’t help expressing this sentiment on Twitter after the retreat was over:

Total time spent tweeting this: Maybe 30 seconds.

Then a funny thing happened. Someone named Jang from Korea responded to my tweet with a question:

I didn’t know Jang, so I glanced at his Twitter profile, and I saw that my friends, June Kim and SeungBum Kim, followed him. That was a good sign, so I responded, resulting in the following exchange, each message less than 140 characters:

I was planning to send an email to some folks at Code for America to follow up, but it wasn’t necessary. Conversations on Twitter happen out in the open, and Cyd Harrell, Code for America’s UX evangelist, saw the thread and responded. This is what happened:

I don’t know what’s going to emerge from this whole interaction, but something good will. At worst:

  • I learned something new about an issue I care about in a country I care about
  • I made some new connections
  • I facilitated some new connections
  • I strengthened some old connections

All from simply tweeting how I was feeling one evening.

This is what can happen when you have ways to communicate with lots of people transparently and with very little friction. But it’s also critical to recognize what underlies the technology that makes this sort of thing possible: people, trust, relationships, and literacy.

Bottom line: This sort of thing makes me very, very happy.

Turning Mistakes Into Opportunities

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Ben Davis recently wrote about technical difficulties with The Bay Lights art exhibit on the Bay Bridge. He started by sharing an anecdote about how, when he worked as a waiter at a restaurant, he used to turn botched orders into “opportunities to forge deeper connections with customers”:

I learned a few powerful lessons:

1. Acknowledge the problem
2. Take responsibility for the solution
3. Apologize sincerely
4. Address the issue
5. Offer something extra special—on the house

By staying calm, positive, solution-oriented and generous, I found that upset diners often became loyal regulars, even personal friends. A moment of dissatisfaction, respectfully and graciously handled, bonded us more deeply than had no issue occurred. We all hate it when things go wrong, yet hearts are won when someone truly works hard to make things right again.

This is a beautiful description of how and why to be accountable.

What Alignment Feels Like

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

What does great collaboration feel like? Why is it so valuable to invest time and resources into getting a group to align?

If you’ve ever experienced great collaboration in any context, you know the answer. I loved reading race car driver Ashley Freiberg’s account of this feeling after running the New York Marathon for the first time:

I had been to New York a few times before, and usually people are heading in their own directions trying to get to work or wherever they need to be. What was amazing was that this event really pulled everyone together for one common goal. To them the runners weren’t just people running; they were their family, neighbors, mothers, grandpas or sisters pushing through adversity. It was inspiring to run alongside these people who were in wheelchairs, who were blind or who had prosthetic legs and were still going strong. I ran with people who were young and old and who were from countries all over the world. The crowd went absolutely nuts no matter who you were.

I really can’t describe how powerful this was to me mentally. Every time I felt like I wanted to give up and slow down and walk, the crowds, runners, my BTWF teammates and my friends who came from all over the place to support me gave me that extra push to keep going.