Be Intentional, but Hold It Lightly

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Seb Paquet and I had our second weekly call this morning. (Our “jazz hands” insights video from this week’s call is below.) Seb opened the conversation by sharing a personal story and discussing the importance of being fearless, but not reckless.

Which raises the question: What’s the difference between “fearless” and “reckless”?

After our conversation, Seb posted this very question on Facebook. There were a number of interesting replies, with more likely to come. Two, in particular, resonated with me. Alan Yelsey suggested that the distinction was in whether or not you “fully considered the risk or the value of the objective.” Helen Aitkin noted that the etymology of “reckless” was “without care.”

I agree with both Alan and Helen. I think that intention is the critical distinction, which is still a very fine line. If you take a risk that has a 90 percent chance of failing, and you understand that risk up-front, you are being intentional, but other people might still consider it reckless.

So many of the challenges that we face are ultimately about navigating tensions gracefully. By definition, there are no easy ways to describe how to do this. The best principle I’ve found for navigating these tensions is to be intentional, but hold it lightly.

In other words, have a goal, but don’t be so bound by it that you miss out on the opportunity to learn. Put a stake in the ground, but be open to surprises and new learning. If you practice this basic principle over and over again, you eventually develop an instinct for how to assess risk and navigate uncertainty. If you move without clarity about your intentions, or if you hold on to those intentions too tightly, you will likely fail.

This, to me, is the essence of craft, and it’s become the foundational principle of my work.

I shared this principle with my friend, Mark Bolgiano, a few years ago, and he noted that this same principle applies to golf. You need to have a strategy for how you are going to propel your ball to the hole, but if you grip your club too tightly, you will likely miss your mark. I found this to be a nice physical metaphor for how to think about this principle.

Similarly, Seb brought up the analogy of scientists discovering anomalies in their experiments and reacting in frustration, when the anomalies may actually be clues to some groundbreaking new principle. If you hold onto your intentions too tightly, you miss out on the learning.

The discipline of being intentional is an art form in and of itself. On both calls with Seb so far, we’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing the challenges of setting good goals and being explicit about success. Here are some principles that have emerged along with some relevant blog posts:

  • Define success as a spectrum, from minimum to wild. Seb was the first to share this principle in our conversations by way of a great template from Amy Kirschner. He also noted the importance of considering the zone of proximal development. I first picked up this idea from Kristin Cobble (read her blog post for more), who was strongly influenced by Robert Fritz’s “rubber band model” for navigating tensions.
  • Define both success and failure. This is a good way of coming up with and gut-checking your spectrum of success, and it was my “jazz hands” moment from today’s conversation. When we are far removed from the actual moment of assessing success or failure, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we might treat something as success when we actually believe it to be failure. If you ask, “What is failure?” explicitly, you can identify this behavior well in advance.
  • Ask the “wild” success question twice. In the same way that we might be overly lax in defining minimal success, we can often be overly constrained in defining “wild” success. We self-censor ourselves, because we don’t really believe that wild success is possible. Another trick I picked up from Kristin is to ask this question twice, explaining, “Okay, how would you really, truly define wild success?”
  • Always measure something, and evolve your metrics as you learn. If you rely purely on how you feel, you will either rationalize your way into thinking you are always successful, or you will punish yourself unfairly.
  • Include failure rate in your definition of success. This was Seb’s “jazz hands” moment from our conversation. If you’re trying to accomplish anything hard, you need to expect that you will fail some percentage of the time. You should actually incorporate that failure rate into your success metrics. We agreed that succeeding about two-thirds of the time felt about right, which is consistent with Google’s expected measure of success.

Here’s a story I shared last year about applying the principle of being intentional and holding it lightly on one particular project. And, without further ado, here are Seb and my “jazz hands” moments from today:

Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Noble Pursuit Syndrome

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Earlier this week, I told my friend, Jeff Mohr, about a strange result from a survey that we took last year about nonprofits’ experiences working with consultants. As Rebecca Petzel noted in her writeup of the results, the nonprofits we surveyed generally expressed a high degree of satisfaction in the quality of their consultants’ work, but the majority also said that the work had not stuck. (Here’s some additional analysis performed by a larger group of participants at a followup workshop.)

How could organizations be satisfied with the work if it didn’t stick?

Jeff’s response was to cite a term that his dad, Mike Mohr, likes to use: “Noble Pursuit Syndrome.” It seems that folks in the social change space often rationalize work by suggesting that the intentions were good, therefore the work could not have been bad.

Not only is this something I observe others do all the time, it’s something I personally do all the time! My higher self is aware of this and tries to counterbalance it, which is a big reason why I ultimately left consulting. But it’s also a big reason why I stayed in consulting so long. I and my team would work our butts off on an inspiring project, and at the end of the project, we would review our often softly-framed success metrics, discuss all of the things that we thought went well, then collect our checks and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.

I always felt (and still do feel) completely validated from a market standpoint. But it was hard to truly assess the quality of our work from a social impact standpoint. While I tried (and am still trying) to be thoughtful and rigorous about impact, I often found (and am still finding) myself falling back on Noble Pursuit Syndrome. It’s a challenge, and I believe it’s a serious problem in this space.

Jeff said that Mike has threatened to write more about the syndrome. I, for one, would love to hear what he has to say, and I hope that others share their thoughts and experiences with this as well.

May Progress Report on Balance and Impact

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

“I think I’m probably going to end up like a Tex Winter at some point. Maybe like a Pete Newell. Pete was on the sidelines for a number of teams for maybe the last 15-20 years of his life where he just encouraged people how to play. He sat with Lenny Wilkens in Cleveland for a number of years. He was a helpful consultant. That might be what I’m left to do — be a mentor of some sort.”

—Phil Jackson, 67-year old basketball
coaching legend on his basketball future

The end of May has arrived, month five of my self-imposed and hopefully temporary retirement. As I noted a few weeks ago, I have some clarity on some professional goals and even some ideas about how to achieve them. As expected, this whole process has been both exciting and scary. It’s also sometimes depressing. When you put your heart and soul and sweat and tears into something for ten years, it becomes a huge part of who you are. Unraveling that feels like therapy, in both good and bad ways.

Earlier today, I read the above quote from Phil Jackson, and I found it a huge downer. That guy won 11 rings. I know he’s 67 with bad hips and a bad back and that he doesn’t want to do the coaching grind anymore, but there are undoubtedly better ways for him to be contributing to the game right now. What’s worse is that I kind of see myself in his words right now, even though I’m 30 years younger and nowhere near as accomplished.

I still get consulting inquiries, all of which I’ve turned down so far. It’s nice to know that people still respect you. It’s even nicer that Groupaya is still around and that Rebecca Petzel is still working as a consultant, as I can point people to either of them and feel good about the referral.

But I find a lot of that hard as well. It’s hard to turn down great projects, especially when your bank account is going in the wrong direction. Chatting with people about this stuff gets the intellectual juices flowing. Then the ego kicks in, as I imagine what I’d do if I took on those projects.

When I inevitably refer the work to my peers, I’m sometimes deflated by what I imagine will not happen because I’m not taking on the work. A lot of that is pure ego, silly and wrong. Some of it is not. Either way, it can be hard to let go.

Sometimes, I see work happening in less-than-skillful ways, and I get angry and feel myself wanting to fall back into comfortable roles and patterns. “Hire me as a consultant, and I’ll show you how it’s done!” I think to myself. Maybe I’m right. However, if I’m honest with myself about what it means to make a true impact while maintaining my health and sanity, I remember why I’m trying to break out of that very mindset.

Earlier this month, I attended the wonderful Creating Space conference in Baltimore, where Esther Nieves shared her motto: “Slow the pace, stay in the race.” I try to remind myself of this constantly, and when I’m actually practicing it, I can see it working. I’m thinking about things in a methodical way, and I’m liking how that process is going and how balanced my life is feeling while I’m doing that. I’m talking to a lot of people, listening deeply, trying to challenge my own assumptions about what needs to happen in the world. I’m doing experiments systematically, and I’m learning a lot that way.

Still, it’s hard. It does not come naturally for me to go slow, even when I’m actually and literally running. I occasionally go on long runs with my sister, who is constantly encouraging me to slow down so that I can run longer. I just can’t do it. I get bored. I’ll end up stopping after five miles, completely gassed, and she’ll keep running another three or four miles.

When I’m not using all of my skills, I feel underutilized and unhappy. I just have to keep reminding myself that I’m going slowly right now so that I can figure out ways to apply all of my skills in a more strategic, impactful, and joyful way.

Which brings me back to Phil Jackson and the world of sports. Earlier this year, as I went through a process of personal visioning, I put together a list of role models. One of those people was Jon Gruden, the youngest coach ever to win a Super Bowl at 41. He’s been out of coaching for the past four years, to the constant surprise of many pundits, given that he’s still young and in-demand and that he’s a self-proclaimed football junkie who has never had (nor wanted) a life outside of football. What I love about Gruden is that he’s found outside-the-box and probably even more impactful ways to stay close to the game.

I know what I’m passionate about, and I know what kind of life I want to live. I’m in that outside-the-box mode right now, which is occasionally a struggle, but which has been great overall. I think good things are going to come out of this whole process, although I am impatient to figure out what those things will be. I’ll just have to keep reminding myself: Slow the pace, stay in the race….

Balance, Impact, and Next Steps

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Sunset over Kaimana Beach in Waikiki.

It’s a warm January evening in Honolulu. I’m sitting on my hotel lanai in my shorts and bare feet, looking out over the ocean. Here I am, two weeks into my self-imposed  “unemployment,” and life is good.

Since my announcement that I was leaving Groupaya, the company I cofounded in late 2011, lots of friends and colleagues have written to wish me well, which I have greatly appreciated. Several have asked for more details as to why I was leaving and what I was going to do next.

The main theme of my parting post was my desire for balance. But that only tells half the story. The reason I didn’t have balance in my life was that I wanted to maximize my impact in the world. I didn’t know how to live my life so that I could have both balance and impact. That’s what I want to figure out this year.

There are lots of things I love about consulting, but I don’t think it’s the route for me to maximize my impact. Otherwise, I would never have left Groupaya. My life the past few weeks is a case in point. I still have some client commitments that I’m completing as a contractor under Groupaya, and I basically have a full client load right now. I’m here in Hawaii for work, although I’m staying a little longer for pleasure.

And that’s the point. I didn’t feel like I had the space to take that time for myself last year. And even though I still have a full client load right now, I am far less stressed than I was when I was running Groupaya. For example, I like to sleep, but I averaged six hours a night all of last year, not because I didn’t have the time, but because I wasn’t able to sleep any longer. Since leaving, I’ve averaged eight hours a night.

Why was last year so stressful? Part of it was the strain of supporting a company. As a consultant, the challenge is less about revenue and more about cashflow. This is doubly the case when you have people working for you. We exceeded our revenue goals last year, but we had to deal with some gnarliness around clients paying us on time. Such is the life of a consultant. However, while we had to bring in consistent revenue to support our team, my peers also enabled us to do bigger things better, and they enabled me to focus on things I wanted to focus on. They also just made everything more fun and alive. The team more than compensated for any additional stress.

The real source of stress was completely self-imposed. Our goal was to have a greater impact on the world than consulting would enable us to have. Our strategy was to focus on building a stable consulting practice while simultaneously and aggressively learning and exploring. We were able to do both, and we were even able to protect our team from overworking themselves, but I was not able to protect me from myself.

We did a good job of maximizing our impact as consultants. We chose clients who were bold learners, we only worked on projects directly sponsored by C-level leaders, we turned down work that was not properly resourced, and we were just starting to increase the minimum lengths of our engagements. The nature of our work also helped. All of our projects were participatory, which meant that our projects generally had greater organizational alignment and buy-in.

We had plenty of room to improve, but we were also rapidly approaching our impact ceiling. I wanted to blow through that ceiling. We had ideas for how to do this, but we needed time and resources to play with these ideas on top of the time and resources we were already spending on client work.

I was motivated to do both, and we had the team to do it. But it was impossible for me to do both and find my balance, and it wasn’t going to happen this year either. When you’re motivated, it’s easy to tell yourself, “Just do it for one year.” This is a viable strategy if you’re disciplined about setting that boundary and if you’re not simply kidding yourself.

I wasn’t. That’s why I had to leave.

So how am I going to have both balance and impact? I can think of two possible directions. The first is to get out of the meta and apply my skills toward something more concrete. In other words, focus on a vertical (e.g. children’s health) rather than a horizontal (i.e. collaboration). I have no idea what that vertical might be, but I’m open to this possibility, whether it takes the form of my own company or somebody else’s.

The second is to continue playing with some of the ideas we started exploring last year, except without the burden of having to find and deliver consulting work simultaneously. More specifically, I’d like to find ways to develop the field, giving motivated changemakers real opportunities to practice and improve with guidance and feedback.

For example, my friend and colleague, Rebecca Petzel, was already talented and experienced when we first started working with her two years ago. Thanks to our strong brand, we were able to create opportunities for her that she wouldn’t have gotten on her own. Rebecca took those opportunities and ran with them, going from very good to great in just two years. She would have gotten there without us, but we were able to accelerate that process. Plus, we got the better end of the bargain, because she was a delight to work with, and we learned a ton from her.

What if I could create those same opportunities over the same amount of time for 100 people like Rebecca, talented changemakers building their own practices or embedded in other people’s organizations?

This is the question I’m currently pondering. While I do that, I’m going to finish up my client obligations, create lots of space for myself, and play and explore. To help me with this process, I’m going to go from sunny Hawaii to frigid Cincinnati next week to consult with some experts on play. I can’t wait!