Learning and Collaboration

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

On a warm summer evening in Virginia last July, I sat on Marcia Conner‘s porch and wondered aloud whether we were in the same business. Marcia cares about collaboration, but she’s nuts about learning. If she doesn’t hear the word “learning” in the context of projects she’s involved with, alarm bells go off in her head.    (LJ7)

I’m equally passionate about collaboration and learning, but I can talk about my work without ever mentioning the latter. My reasoning, as I explained that night, was that good collaboration encompasses learning, and the best way to learn is to collaborate. You can’t talk about “collaboration” without also thinking about “learning.”    (LJ8)

Doug Engelbart often says that high-performance communities are experts at CoDIAK — collectively developing, integrating, and applying knowledge. I hate the acronym, because I think it’s unnecessarily esoteric. What CoDIAK boils down to is:    (LJ9)

  • Learn.    (LJA)
  • Share and apply what you know.    (LJB)
  • Repeat early and often.    (LJC)

There’s that “learn” word again.    (LJD)

I still believe that collaboration encompasses learning, but I’ve changed my mind about whether it’s important to explicitly mention learning in the context of my work. Marcia, of course, is to blame. We were chatting in the attic of a colleague’s home last Friday, with her two year old son, Clarke, playing on the floor as we talked, and our conversation again drifted towards learning. I was talking about a project I’m involved with, and I explained that while it still felt important, I wasn’t learning any more.    (LJE)

As soon as I said it, I laughed to myself, because it sounded like something that Marcia would have complained about. Yesterday, as I was reading Allison Fine‘s Momentum, a book that Marcia gave me, I was again struck by how important learning is to my work. I believe very strongly in defining projects concretely and getting things done, but I refuse to take on a client who doesn’t care about learning. I expect to learn from my work, and I expect my clients to want to learn as part of our collaboration. This is not a requirement to be in this business. There are plenty of projects where clients don’t give a damn about learning. They just want you to get the work done. I’ve been offered these kinds of projects in the past, and the work itself is often intellectual, enjoyable, and well-paying. I still turn it down. My mission is to help people learn about collaboration, and I won’t work on projects where that’s not happening.    (LJF)

I’ve already made it a practice to describe Blue Oxen Associates‘ long-term goal as building and facilitating a Learning Community centered around collaboration. I could just as easily have chosen Engelbart’s term, Improvement Community, or Etienne Wenger‘s term, Community of Practice, but I chose Peter Senge‘s instead, and the fact that “learning” is there was a major reason why. I’m currently in the process of revamping our web site, and I plan on making “learning” a more explicit part of our message.    (LJG)

December GivingSpace Workshop

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

There were several interesting presentations at Tom Munnecke‘s December 11 GivingSpace workshop, as well as some worthwhile discussion. Some quick thoughts and tidbits:    (NA)

The workshop began with one of Paul Andrews‘s Improbable Pairs videos. This one told the story of Yitzhak Frankenthal, an Israeli whose son was killed by Palestinians, and Jawad Tibi, a Palestinian whose brothers were killed by the Israeli military. Their tales are gutwrenching, but rather than respond with hatred, the two formed a group called the Parents Bereavement Forum, a support group for both Israeli and Palestinian families personally affected by the violence. Paul filmed and edited their stories masterfully. The video was only about ten minutes, but there was not a dry eye in the audience.    (NB)

Heather Wood-Ion gave a marvelous talk on transformation. An analogy she made that stood out for me was that the mythology in nonprofits centers around martyrdom. Words like “sacrifice” and “suffering” are bandied about. The mythology in forprofits centers around heroes. There, people talk about building legacies. These attitudes explain why nonprofits are so poor at collaborating with each other. There is a sense that martyrdom and collaboration are mutually exclusive. People want to share their stories of suffering, not of what went right and why. (There was some followup discussion about this at the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory.)    (NC)

Megan Smith, one of the founders of Planet Out and currently a Reuters Digital Visions Fellow at Stanford and an employee at Google, explained the 2/3 rule: Two-thirds of every successful community on the Internet consists of conversations. Successful sites, she said, are good at gardening those conversations. Megan also described a giant LCD map of the world at the Google offices. When someone in the world queries Google, a light blinks at that location on the map. What strikes Megan is that there are entire regions of the world that are always dark, a vivid visual reminder of the digital divide. In addition to being a clear thinker and a dynamic storyteller, Megan also demonstrated a diplomat’s touch, when she very skillfully and transparently defused an exchange between participants that had gotten very heated.    (ND)

Jerry Michalski explained his acronym du jour: MADA (Memory, Analysis, Discourse, Action). MADA struck me as an excellent (better?) synthesis for what Doug Engelbart calls CoDIAK (Collective Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge). Jerry had the line of the workshop, when he pointed to the conversation map that Megan had drawn on the white board, and said, “All that discussion without memory and analysis is like going around in a giant circle jerk.” Jerry also suggested that business are partially to blame for why we don’t have better tools for group memory. Business of culture, he observed, don’t want us to have a memory. They want us to buy what they’re currently telling us we need. (See also my previous notes on group memory.)    (NE)

Richard Gabriel talked about the Hillside Group and Pattern Languages. He said that the Hillside Group “practices an aggressive disregard for novelty.” Jerry, incidentally, called Pattern Languages “deglazed wisdom.” Jerry was on fire that day.    (NF)

We participated in a Conversation Cafe for the latter part of the workshop. The topic was, “What can we do to create self-organizing systems that discover and replicate positive, scalable, small things?” We broke into several small groups, sat at different tables in the “cafe,” and drew on butcher paper as we talked. Here’s an excerpt from a previous blog entry about one of those conversations:    (NG)

Another great example of the challenges of SharedLanguage cropped up at the GivingSpace workshop in SanFrancisco last Thursday. Six of us were discussing small, concrete steps that lead to transformation, and HeatherNewbold described how MattGonzalez? for Mayor campaign buttons had galvanized the progressive community in SanFrancisco. Four of us knew exactly what Heather was describing, because we lived in the Bay Area and followed local politics. All she had to do was mention the buttons, and we understood what she meant. The other two people at our table, however, had no idea what we were talking about. One was from SanDiego, and the other simply didn’t follow politics.  T    (NH)

Here are the two products of the conversations at our table, courtesy of Fen Labalme.    (NI)

Every time I participate in one of these workshops, I find myself paying close attention to the facilitation itself, inevitably comparing it to other experiences. Shelley Hamilton’s technique shared some similarities with the MGTaylor process, and at one point, she cited Stuart Kaufman’s work, which also inspired Matt Taylor and Gail Taylor. Overall, Shelley did a good job. I especially liked the Conversation Cafe. The one thing I didn’t like was that there was no Report Out session following the cafe. It would have been nice to have had a group session where we summarized our conversations and sought connections between those summaries.    (NJ)