Dog Is Love

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My partner, Eun-Joung, and I went to the grocery store yesterday afternoon to pick up some items for our New Year’s meal. While perusing the meat aisle, the butcher asked about the button on Eun-Joung’s vest.

A few months ago, my friends’, Catherine and Reid’s, dog passed away suddenly. Her name was Cam, and she was incredibly sweet, even as dogs go. Eun-Joung loves all of my friends’ dogs, but she especially loved Cam, and when we discussed potentially adopting a dog of our own, she would often cite Cam as a model.

When Cam died, Catherine was devastated. As hard as it was to watch her in this state, I couldn’t help but admire how openly she mourned and how willingly she reached out to her friends in her time of need. My inclination would have been to do the opposite, but watching Catherine and other friends deal with loss have helped me realize that completely shutting myself off is not the right way to do it.

Catherine and Reid organized a memorial for Cam at Fort Funston. It was simple and beautiful and perfect. Her friend, Vanessa, who was leading us through the memorial, invited us to name and remember others we had lost. It was a small, but generous gesture. I mentioned one of my mentors, who had recently passed, and I found myself suddenly welling up. The space had been created for Cam, but it ended up being a place where I and others could fully feel and process other grief that we were carrying.

Catherine, always the maker, created buttons for everyone with Cam’s photo and the words, “Dog is love.” Eun-Joung has been wearing that button ever since, and that was the button that caught the butcher’s attention.

When the butcher asked about the button, Eun-Joung told him about Cam. “I’m sorry for your friend,” he replied softly. “I know how she feels. My dog passed away six days ago.”

We asked him about his loss, and he shared stories and photos. Even though we only spent a few minutes talking, it felt like time slowed amidst the hustle and bustle of folks doing their last-minute grocery shopping. A day later, I’m still struck by the intimacy of that moment, sparked by that little button and all that it represents

Party Waves Are Critical for Learning and Growth

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

The other day, my friend and colleague, Catherine Madden, was telling me about her and her husband’s forays into surfing. Apparently, some surfing communities are more territorial about their waves — especially toward beginners — than others.

It’s understandable. Surfing is already challenging without worrying about a newbie blindsiding you while you’re catching a wave. But if everyone were like this, how would anyone new get to learn?

Apparently, surfers in Bolinas tend to be more inclusive. Catherine told me a story about how she was on a wave there, and someone else yelled at her to get out of the way. Another surfer went up to her and said, “Don’t worry. You’re welcome on this wave. It’s a party wave!”

Here’s what Surfer Today says about party waves:

A party wave starts with two surfers and could end with half a dozen enthusiastic party animals. And that’s when surfing becomes a team sport.

How do you run a party a wave? It couldn’t be simpler. Just be kind, shake hands with strangers and have fun at the same time.

There’s room for everybody – on top of the wave, riding near the whitewater section, carving on the face of the wave, stalling on the shoulder, or performing a relaxed bottom turn in the flats.

As a collaboration practitioner, I’d like to see more party waves in my field. I’ve heard from many of my more experienced peers that they only want to work with experienced practitioners and that they don’t have time to “train more junior people.”

I understand this. When you’re doing high stakes work and when your reputation is on the line, you want to be surrounded by other folks who are skilled.

At the same time, I think there are several mindsets that are challenging here. First, I question what most people define as “experienced.” Collaboration is something that everyone experiences in many aspects of their lives, not just professionally. I find that those experiences are equally important as professional experiences, if not more so. Just because someone has less experience working formally as a facilitator, for example, does not mean that they’re not incredibly experienced.

Second, when you’re doing high stakes work, everyone makes mistakes, not just “junior” people. I’ve often found that working with emerging practitioners provides a fresh, broader perspective that often helps prevent mistakes that I, with my narrower perspective, might make. Furthermore, part of being a skilled practitioner means that I’m creating a safer, more resilient space for mistakes in general. If no one is making mistakes, you’re probably not trying hard enough.

Finally, it’s become trendy for collaboration practitioners to explicitly mention “equity” as one of their skills. This makes sense. Both collaboration and equity, fundamentally, are about power, and if you haven’t been thinking explicitly about equity, you‘re not going to be able to do your work effectively.

However, if you truly care about equity, you should be thinking about equity in your own field as well. So much of equity is about lifting up others who are less privileged than you, often for systemic reasons. How can we, as collaboration practitioners, do more of this for other practitioners?

One way to do this is to adopt more of a “party wave” mindset about our own work, finding ways to bring in and support more emerging practitioners. Not only would this be better for the field, I think it leads to better quality work. And, like party waves, it’s more fun for everyone!

A Happy Information Hygiene Moment (and a Great Explanation of the Backfire Effect)

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Yesterday, my sister shared this Oatmeal comic that wonderfully explains the backfire effect, the phenomenon where seeing evidence that contradicts our beliefs hardens those beliefs rather than changes our minds.

I love The Oatmeal for its engaging and often humorous visual explanations of important concepts. (XKCD and Nicky Case are also brilliant at this.) My sister knows this, and asked me if I had seen it before. Even though I loved this one, it didn’t ring a bell.

So I did what I try to do in situations like this. Rather than just file it away in my Evernote (where I have thousands of clippings that I almost never see again), I went to record it on the human perception page under “Confirmation Bias” on the Faster Than 20 wiki. To my delight, I found that I not only had seen it before, but I had already captured it on my wiki!

It’s a practice I call good information hygiene (a term coined by my colleague, Chris Dent). When we do it well, we’re not just filing things away where we can find them, we are continually synthesizing what we’re consuming. The act of integrating it into a larger knowledge repository is not only good information hygiene, but is also a critical part of sensemaking. Doing it once is great, but doing it multiple times (as Case and my colleague, Catherine Madden, have also explained beautifully) makes it more likely to stick.

Here’s another, simpler example that doesn’t involve a wiki and may feel more accessible to folks tool-wise. In my late 20s, I met Tony Christopher through my mentor, Doug Engelbart. We had such a great conversation, when I got home, I wanted to make sure to enter his contact information immediately into my contact database. When I opened it, to my surprise, he was already in there! I had very briefly met him at an event a few years earlier, and I had recorded a note saying how much I had enjoyed that short interaction.

I love when moments like this happen, because it shows that my tools and processes are making me smarter, and it motivates me to stay disciplined. I wish that tool developers today focused more on supporting these kinds of behaviors rather than encouraging more fleeting engagement with information.