Lessons on Mentors and Mentorship

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Rebecca Facilitating

My friend and former colleague, Rebecca Petzel, wrote a sweet and thoughtful blog post about mentorship, social entrepreneurship, and her experiences at Groupaya. Truthfully, I got a bit teary when I read it. I mean, she called me an “elder.” That’s just wrong. I’m still in my 30s, for pete’s sake!

In her piece, she said something that troubled me (besides calling me old). She wrote, “What breaks my heart is that most in my current town seem to look their noses down on the opportunity to learn from those with more experience.”

I often feel the same way, but I hope it isn’t true. Perhaps it simply doesn’t occur to people to seek mentorship. Or maybe they’ve had bad experiences dealing with people “with more experience.”

A few years ago, I wrote a post entitled, “Advice for (Female) Changemakers.” My second recommendation there was, “Find your people,” and I alluded to a story about forming the advisory board for Blue Oxen Associates back in 2002.

One of the people I approached was Richard Gabriel. I didn’t know him personally at the time, but I had read many of his writings, including his classic essay, “Worse Is Better,” and his book, Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community. It was the latter that made me reach out to him. I was interested in applying Christopher Alexander’s notion of pattern languages to collaboration, and Richard was one of the pioneers who had introduced these concepts to the software engineering community.

So I invited him to coffee. Richard turned out to be brilliant, thoughtful, eclectic, and very kind, exactly the kind of person I wanted to be around and learn from. Toward the end of our conversation, I started drumming up the courage to ask him if he would serve on our advisory board. Despite his gentle demeanor, I was very nervous. Richard was accomplished; I was not. Worse, I had no idea what I was doing, and I could barely explain what the company was supposed to be about. These did not seem to be ingredients for success.

But I was there, and he was there, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever have another opportunity to do this face-to-face. So I asked.

Richard said, “Yes, on one condition.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That you actually reach out to me for advice.”

It turned out that others had asked him to serve in similar capacities, but that they never bothered reaching out to him. And he didn’t see the point of being on an advisory board if no one asked him for advice.

How simple and wonderful is that?

To this day, I have no idea why he was willing to say yes, and I’m not sure he knows how much that and his subsequent advice — which I asked for many times — meant to me. But I had concocted many complicated reasons in my head for why I shouldn’t reach out to him and why he wouldn’t say yes. Fortunately, I ignored those voices in my head.

Unfortunately, those voices still talk to me, even today, and it’s a constant practice for me to ignore them. So if you’re seeking opportunities to learn from others and if you’re hearing similar voices in your head, I hope you’ll ignore them too, and ask. And if you’re wanting to mentor others, don’t assume that others will come to you, and don’t get cranky when they don’t. Invite people to learn with you.

(Here’s my invitation.)

I have been extremely fortunate to have had many mentors in my (still very young) life. It’s something that I continue to seek, because it’s such a valuable and meaningful way to learn. A few years ago, my friend, Katherine Fulton, was observing the many mentors in my life, and she said, “You’re starting to reach the age where people are going to be reaching out to you to mentor them.”

That made me start reflecting on the kind of mentor I wanted to be. I’m still figuring it out, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Be humble. More specifically, don’t assume that your experience makes you better or smarter or wiser than anyone else. Experience is a great teacher, but you have to be a great student. As much experience as I have, there’s even more that I haven’t experienced. That will always be the case. The best mentors never stop learning… from everyone, young and old.

Be open. Mentorship is not about molding an army of young people into clones of yourself. With experience often comes rigidity. I’m determined to fight it, but I know it’s a losing battle. I’ve shared a lot of my thinking and experiences with Rebecca over the years. Some of it, she’s taken to heart, and some of it, she’s rejected. That’s a great thing. Whatever she chooses to do with her life and her career, it’s going to be great, and if I’ve managed to contribute to that in any positive way, I’ll be grateful. Moreover, I’ll have the opportunity to learn from the things that she chooses to break away from.

Be caring. As much as I’ve learned from all of my mentors, the thing they did for me that meant more than any of that was to care about me. I’m overwhelmed with emotions every time I think about this. I would have failed a thousand times over without their moral support, and I’m not sure I deserved any of it. What I can do is pay it forward, to look after those around me without expecting anything in return.

Understanding the importance of caring has been my greatest lesson so far. But, I’m still learning.

Drive On

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Most folks know Richard Gabriel for his Worse Is Better essays, his work with Pattern Languages, and his involvement with the Hillside Group, among many other things. I know him as an invaluable and exceptionally generous sounding board for my crazy ideas over the past three years.    (JOQ)

Now there’s an opportunity to know Richard for one of his greatest passions: poetry. Drive On, a book of lyrical poetry, is now available.    (JOR)

Election Redux: A Call for Conversations

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Trudging through the surge of commentary in the blogosphere following the elections, Kellan Elliott-McCrea‘s post jumped out at me. He wrote:    (4Q2)

There is a political theory that says that people who disagree with you aren’t fundamentally bad people, but misguided, or perhaps coming from different backgrounds. Having just spent a couple of hours talking to someone who voted for Bush I’d have to say I disagree. He is superficially a good person, but deep down firmly believes that might is right, American lives are more important then any other lives, that policies which discriminate on race make statistical sense, human rights are a privilege but capital rights are inalienable. How do you answer that? We can quite civilly agree to disagree, and go back to our regular neutral pleasant conversations not to mention a few moments of uneasy solidarity making fun of Christian fundamentalists, but the chasm of understanding is so vast I can’t imagine what crossing it would look like.    (4Q3)

I know many people who feel the same way as Kellan, and I find this troubling. Is intelligent discourse truly a lost cause? Are we as polarized as those red and blue maps make it seem? Is conversation pointless?    (4Q4)

No, no, and no!    (4Q5)

Lakoff on Framing    (4Q6)

I’m a huge admirer of George Lakoff‘s work. He’s part of the canon of thinkers who strongly influenced The Blue Oxen Way (along with Doug Engelbart, Christopher Alexander, and Richard Gabriel). So when I saw that Lakoff was speaking the same day I was at last weekend’s Green Festival in San Francisco, I decided to show up five hours earlier than scheduled so I could hear what he had to say.    (4Q7)

In a nutshell, Lakoff’s thesis (detailed in his books, Don’t Think of an Elephant! and Moral Politics) is that conservatives have effectively hijacked the language of public policy. When we use terms like “tax relief” and “pro-life,” we are implicitly framing the debate from a conservative standpoint (e.g. “Taxes are an affliction,” and “Pro-abortion implies anti-life”). Progressives, he argues, must learn to reframe issues if they’re to have a chance at swaying the so-called swing-voters.    (4Q8)

I’ve read Lakoff’s thesis many times, but this was the first time I heard him talk about it in person, and what I heard troubled me. Obviously, he was not speaking to a bunch of cognitive scientists. He was speaking to a bunch of fired-up activists looking for something to cheer about, and he did a good job playing to that crowd. But heard live (and obviously simplified), his thesis seemed to suggest that we were on the road to further polarization, a zero-sum game where a small minority of the country would determine which extreme would win.    (4Q9)

If you read Moral Politics, it’s clear that Lakoff’s thinking is not that simplistic. But I couldn’t help calling him on it anyway. After his talk, I asked him, “What about framing the issues so that the two sides can talk to each other rather to their own constituents?” Lakoff’s response was that a progressive framing would do just that by balancing the language of public policy, which is heavily slanted towards conservatives right now.    (4QA)

A Diverse Community of Deep Thinkers    (4QB)

Okay, I can buy that. Lakoff is positioning framing as a winning strategy for progressive politicians, but it can also be seen as leveling the playing field for intelligent, balanced discourse. The problem is that it’s not enough to facilitate the latter. In the first place, we need to talk to people who think differently from ourselves. In the second place, we need to be deeper thinkers.    (4QC)

The latter is the harder problem. For starters, we have to know the facts, regardless of how they are spun. Whether or not you believe that the Bush administration knew there were no weapons of mass destruction prior to invading Iraq, or whether or not you care, the fact was that they weren’t there. Yet a large percentage of Americans still don’t realize this. If so many people can’t get these facts straight, how can we even talk to them about deeper issues, such as whether or not Bush is a good conservative, or why so many conservative publications (The Economist, The New Republic, The Financial Times, The American Conservative) endorsed Kerry?    (4QD)

Well, my answer isn’t going to satisfy most people, but it’s the best that I can offer: The road to deeper thinking starts by talking to folks who are different from ourselves. Talk is not cheap. We can’t and shouldn’t expect to persuade everyone, at least not easily, but what we can do is encourage people to think differently. If we start there, bigger things will follow.    (4QE)

Start with your immediate friends and families. Diversify your blogrolls and reading lists. Travel. Watch old episodes of Firing Line. (You read that right. I consider William Buckley, Jr.‘s old show television’s highest and brightest beacon of intelligent discourse in my lifetime. As right-wing and as forcefully opinionated as Buckley is, he always made it a point to interview people with very different views, which he did with respect and wit.)    (4QF)

Let’s break the divide and talk to each other more, and then let’s see what happens.    (4QG)

Self-Organizing Collaboration at the World Trade Center Ruins

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

In early 2003, I had lunch with Richard Gabriel for the first time, and I explained to him my desire to uncover common collaborative patterns across different disciplines, starting with Open Source communities. Richard recommended that I read William Langewiesche‘s American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, a book that described the dismantling of the ruins and the self-organizing process that emerged.    (2AW)

Over a year later, I finally got around to following Richard’s advice, and I’m glad that I did. Langewiesche’s book is a gripping, thoughtful account of what happened at the World Trade Center site immediately following 9/11.    (2AX)

Langewiesche first set the stage by vividly describing the challenge:    (2AY)

The weight alone defied imagination. What does a chaos of 1.5 million tons really mean? What does it even look like? The scene up close was so large that no one quite knew. In other countries clear answers would have been sought before action was taken. Learned communities would have been formed, and high authorities consulted. The ruins would have been pondered, and a tightly scripted response would have been imposed. Barring that, soldiers would have assumed control. But for whatever reasons, probably cultural, probably profound, little of the sort happened here, where the learned committees were excluded, and the soldiers were relegated to the unhappy role of guarding the perimeter, and civilians in heavy machines simply rolled in and took on the unknown. (12)    (2AZ)

The defiance of conventional process is a theme that Langewiesche returns to over and over again. The raw scale and emotion of the circumstances both required and made it possible for things to be handled differently. Traditional hierarchies broke down. The ability to act and to improvise trumped organizational charts. As a result, people from the “lowly” ranks, such as firemen and laborers, gained power and influence. (9-11) Leaders emerged from a group of people who arrived on scene and simply started doing things. No one told them what they had to do, and no one told them what they couldn’t do. (89, 94) Agility ruled.    (2B0)

A great example of a leader who emerged and the strategy for action he employed was Mike Burton, a top official at the Department of Design and Construction (DDC).    (2B1)

When he [Mike Burton] roamed the pile, as he did twice each day and once again at night, he seemed to accept the disorder there as being in the nature of an energetic response. Rather than hunting out infractions or putting a stop to unauthorized work, as a less confident ruler might have done, he watched for what he called “dead real estate” — unexpectedly quiet ground that resulted from supply-line breakdowns, trucking gridlock, or simple miscommunication between crews that worked the day shift and those that worked the night. (171)    (2B2)

This was by no means a volunteer effort. After the first few days, the only volunteers on site were the Salvation Army and Red Cross, who fed the workers. (180) Not only was there money available, there was a lot of money available, and the contractors involved were well compensated. This later led to accusations over motivation, but Langewiesche stresses that money was an enabler, not the primary motivation for those who worked the site. (9-11, 89)    (2B3)

While the circumstances at the World Trade Center site enabled a powerful new form of organization to emerge, it also caused some unusual problems. On the one hand, the strong stake people felt they had in the recovery process created a tremendous amount of Shared Motivation. On the other hand, it also resulted in jealousy over “ownership” of the process and territorialism between the police, the fire department, and the DDC. (69)    (2B4)

In addition to being a compelling story, American Ground is also a primer in self-organization and collaboration. Some key points:    (2B5)

  • Self-organization does not mean no organization. The process that emerged at the World Trade Center was hierarchical, and the roles were fairly well defined. What was different was that the process and the roles emerged, they were not imposed. Langewiesche wrote, “Later it seemed that one of the smartest was a back-room decision to scrap the organization charts, to finesse the city’s own Office of Emergency Management (OEM), and to allow the DDC to proceed. The federal government was poised to intervene, but agreed to hold off, and then to hold off again.” (66)    (2B6)
  • Intense, shared commitment is a powerful motivator, and as such, it has the potential to transcend many common obstacles. In reality, it takes intensely emotional circumstances to generate such a Shared Motivation, circumstances that are rare. As the job neared completion, traditional bureaucracy naturally asserted itself at the site. (198) That said, the recovery process clearly demonstrated that our assumptions about what motivates people and how things get done are not always right. The most important lesson is that the power of human fulfillment is a much stronger motivation than money.    (2B7)