facilitation – Eugene Eric Kim

Dog Is Love

Published January 1, 2024January 1, 2024 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

Permission to Dream

Published November 30, 2020November 30, 2020 by Eugene Eric Kim

A few years ago, I started tinkering with a new toolkit, which I’m calling the Rubber Band Visioning Toolkit. I created it for a bunch of reasons.

First, I want to see consultants design and facilitate better visioning sessions. I often see visioning designed as a one-off. This is not only an ineffective way to do visioning (as I articulated in my blog post, “Rubber Bands and the Art of Visioning”), it can even cause harm by opening loops that won’t get closed. I also noticed that many consultants who facilitate these sessions don’t actually do their own visioning, not even in one-off form. My hypothesis was that, if consultants had the opportunity to do their own visioning, it would have a slew of benefits, including helping them get better at designing visioning for others.

Second, I want people to have widespread access to visioning. It’s a crazy thing to say, because visioning is simply about stretching your imagination, it’s about striving for something you really want. You don’t need any special tools or guides to do it. You definitely don’t need to hire a consultant for it. And yet, we rarely give ourselves permission to do this, much less the space and the time. That’s a huge loss. I think we all would be so much better off if we all had a clearer idea of what we wanted in the world.

As is always the case with my toolkits, I’ve been piloting it with a bunch of different folks, tweaking and evolving it along the way. I have another set of changes I want to make to it before publicly releasing it hopefully early next year, and I’m planning on making it part of an official offering as well. (As with all of my toolkits, it will be public domain.) While I figure all this stuff out, I’ve continued to pilot it with friends and colleagues. (If you’re interested in giving it a go, ping me.)

I love piloting all of my toolkits. I love designing and tweaking, and I love the excuse to engage with others with this stuff. But I especially love piloting the visioning toolkit. It is so stupidly simple, and yet the impact it has on folks is profound. It’s also incredibly intimate to silence your self-censors, if only for a moment, and then to share what you really want. How often do we really do that with even our closest friends and family?

I kicked off a new session earlier today with two new folks and an old friend and colleague, who had gone through the process once before earlier this year. It was 90 minutes at the end of a packed day, but it just re-energized me and made me very happy. I am so grateful to all of the people willing to give it a spin. I can’t wait to share it with more people, and I hope others will use the toolkit to facilitate sessions with people they care about.

We Don’t All Have to Be Good at Everything, but We Should Value Those Other Things

Published April 25, 2020April 26, 2020 by Eugene Eric Kim

Last month, Deborah Meehan shared the following reflections on leadership and leadership development:

For example, the assumption of many leadership development programs with a set of leadership competencies is that each participant needs to have all of these competencies. Why? When we lead with others why does each person need to have all of these competencies when they could be distributed within the group that is leading some action?

The weekend before I read Deborah’s post, I had listened to Tim Ferris’s interview with the magician, Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame). The whole interview is really good and worth listening to. But I was particularly struck by Penn’s revelation that he had a terrible visual memory, which you might imagine would be a problem for a magician. How was he able to compensate for this, Ferris asked? Penn’s response:

My compensation is Teller. Teller has a phenomenal visual memory. And if you watch Teller and I work, you can very clearly see that I’m doing a radio show. Every bit that I write, I bring to Teller as me doing voiceover from off stage while stuff happens on stage. And then he moves me onto the stage, moves me as part of the action.

Here’s the re-frame that I would offer for leadership development that I use with my own teams. It’s not important for everyone to be good at everything. But it’s important for everyone to value — truly, deeply value — the different competencies. And it’s hard to truly, deeply value those other competencies unless you’ve had a chance to experience what it’s like with them and what it’s like without them.

When I’m working with new collaboration practitioners in a meeting context, I always make them responsible for logistics and operations. Most collaboration practitioners who come to me are not good at these things, nor do they care to be good at them. They usually want to learn how to be good facilitators, and they think facilitation is all about presence or group dynamics or personal development.

However, when it comes to bringing a group alive, design is much more important than facilitation, and logistics are a critical part of design. When you’re in a poorly lit room with heavy, inadequate quantities of food, your meeting is going to suffer. When your participants have trouble checking into their hotels or are not clear on where the meeting is, your meeting is going to suffer. When you’ve planned a whole module around posters hanging up around the room, only to learn that you’re not allowed to hang things on the wall, your meeting is going to suffer.

Many collaboration practitioners look at this as an opportunity to improvise. Sure, improvisation is an important competency, but why put yourself in this position in the first place when it’s completely unnecessary? The reason most practitioners put themselves in this position is that they don’t like to handle the logistics and they think they can get by without it. And that’s often true. But this logic breaks down as the stakes get higher.

What I try to teach others is to value the things that are in your control so that, in the moment, you can be fully present to the things that you can’t. My end goal isn’t to make every collaboration practitioner good at logistics. My end goal is to have collaboration practitioners value it, so that if they’re not good at it, they recruit people who are, and they learn to work well with them.

Passing the Torch

Published December 11, 2013 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.