My Six Favorite Essays on the Groupaya Blog

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

A random interaction with an old friend earlier today caused me to search for something I wrote on the Groupaya blog a few years ago. That got me nostalgic, and I ended up reading every post on the blog.

It was great to revisit these, and it stirred up some useful, sometimes nostalgic memories. I’m proud of what I wrote in my time there (2011-2012), but I’m even prouder of what Kristin Cobble and Rebecca Petzel wrote. They shared some wonderful gems.

It’s unfortunate that the company no longer prioritizes real-time knowledge sharing, since there’s a lot of wisdom in that group from which the world could benefit. It’s understandable, though. Sharing what you learn openly and in real-time is challenging, even scary, and it’s not for everyone. You have to really value it to do it.

If you do, however, you’ll find that it’s not that hard to make it a habit. It’s also tremendously rewarding, as I’ve been rediscovering through my Faster Than 20 blog. The act of writing and sharing is valuable in and of itself. It helps you think, and it helps you find your people. I am constantly humbled by the people I meet and touch through my writing.

But the most valuable benefit of blogging this way is that your ideas become persistent. (This is also what scares a lot of people.) Others can discover what you write long after you’ve written it. That can lead to new connections and possibilities. “Others” sometimes even includes yourself! I find revisiting old thinking to be a hugely valuable learning process, if only to remind me of thoughts I once thought and have since forgotten.

Here, in no particular order, are my six favorite essays from the Groupaya blog that I wrote:

  1. What Does the Collaboration Field Look Like?
  2. Measuring Impact: How You Feel Also Matters
  3. The Illusion of Control
  4. Practicing for the Emergent
  5. The Skillful, Intentional Practitioner.
  6. The Secret to High-Performance: Constant Striving

Enjoy!

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!