Work Rhythms

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve been absent from this blog for almost a month, which is unusual for me. It started with my trip to Baltimore last month for Creating Space, the Leadership Learning Community‘s annual conference, and it ended with the Compendium Institute workshop last week here in the Bay Area. In the middle, I cranked away on my projects and spent some quality time with friends and family. I didn’t get much reading done, but I got a whole lot of good thinking done.    (M7Z)

Nancy White recently wrote of the challenge of balancing work and life, of the nitty gritty and the big picture:    (M80)

Because I fear that if I allow myself to be consumed by work, I will not achieve what I aspire from my work: to add value to the world. Work with a capital W. Some days lately I feel I’m tottering on a “check the box” mode of working. That is when learning stops and, to me, my ability to add value stops. It is a fuzzy line and easy to miss. It is when the quality of attention shifts. Diminishes.    (M81)

I want the shift to always be towards the side of learning, not just getting things done. Of attention and reflection, not forgetting.    (M82)

Her words resonated with me (as they often do). Last year was ground-breaking for me in this regard. For the first time since founding Blue Oxen Associates, I started to build in time for deep reflection about what I was doing and why, and about whether I was accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish.    (M83)

When I was in college, I used to lift weights with a buddy of mine who was an ex-football player. We were both intense guys, and when I’d get in one of my workout grooves (not that often), we’d lift almost two hours a day, five days a week. I got much stronger pretty quickly, but I also peaked quickly as well. I blamed it on the irregularity of these workout grooves.    (M84)

My junior year of college, I started lifting with a neighbor of mine, a big guy who was fanatic about fitness. In one of our early workouts, I complained that I never seemed to get any stronger. “How often do you lift?” he asked. Upon hearing my response, he told me to shorten my workouts — three days a week, no more than 45 minutes a day. I was extremely skeptical, but I tried it, and to my surprise, it worked amazingly well.    (M85)

I’ve written previously about the cycle of thinking and doing. When you’re designing for collaboration, you need to take these natural cycles into account. Doing so usually requires a lot of discipline, especially because it requires fighting workaholic instincts.    (M86)

One of my epiphanies last year was that I wasn’t doing a good job of practicing what I preached, of living what I knew. In particular, I was getting too caught up in the nitty gritty and not spending enough time reflecting. I was getting too deeply involved in too many things, and I was overscheduling and overcommitting.    (M87)

I decided to make four major changes. First, I was going to cut down on the number of projects I would take on simultaneously. That meant saying no more often, and fighting the instinct to get deeply involved in everything I did.    (M88)

Second, I was going to cut down on the number of events I attended, especially those that required travel. Because most of the events I participate in are intense experiences (I rarely participate in networking events), I decided that I would schedule an equal amount of time for reflection. In other words, for every three day workshop, I would need to schedule three days for reflection and processing.    (M89)

Third, I was going to go on more walks. Not only is this a great way to get exercise and think, it’s a great way to think with others. It’s no coincidence that Aristotle and his followers were known as Peripatetics. Instead of constantly meeting folks in coffee shops, I started telling people to join me on walks instead, a trick I picked up from Howard Rheingold. Fortunately, San Francisco has a number of gorgeous places for short, casual hikes.    (M8A)

Fourth, I was going to spend more meaningful time with people. This nicely aligned with my walking edict, but it also meant interacting with less people overall.    (M8B)

I’ve been good about doing all four of these things. Not great, but good. As with the weightlifting, doing less still feels counterintuitive. And just as with the weightlifting, doing less has generated the desired results. This has manifested itself in a number of ways. I’ve only gone on one work trip so far this year, whereas last year, I averaged a trip a month. I’ve blogged more consistently. I feel more connected with colleages and with friends. I’ve had time to really develop ideas and projects that are core to my mission. Most importantly, I feel Less Dumb, which is one of the main tenets of The Blue Oxen Way.    (M8C)

The Blue Oxen Way

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Back when Chris Dent and I started Blue Oxen Associates, we often referred to something called the The Blue Oxen Way. It was something that we both understood and recognized, but that we never actually articulated. Over the years, I tried to rectify this, and I generated pages and pages of notes (including three years worth of rambling blog posts) in the process, to no avail.    (LVU)

Recently, Chris articulated his visions for “Wiki Everywhere,” where he referenced some of our early conversations. As I read it, I relived many of these discussions, and suddenly, it all clicked for me.    (LVV)

The essence of The Blue Oxen Way can be boiled down into three ideas, each of which form the framework for our entire philosophy about collaboration:    (LVW)

The Squirm Test    (LW0)

The Squirm Test is a thought experiment for measuring the amount of Shared Understanding in a group by observing the amount of squirming in a room. Shared Understanding (which is not the same as “same understanding”) manifests itself in the formation of Shared Language. Shared Language is a prerequisite for collaboration.    (LW1)

Much of the messiness of the collaborative process can actually be attributed to lack of Shared Language. Great collaborative design accounts for this rather than wishing it away, which is how most of us deal with it.    (LW2)

Shared Language is The Red Thread that binds all of the crazy things I’m involved with, from Pattern Languages to Wikis, from face-to-face facilitation to organizational strategy. The Squirm Test is a wonderful embodiment of Shared Language.    (LW3)

Be Less Dumb    (LW4)

If Shared Language is the tie that binds, then being Less Dumb is the state that we are all striving to reach. Why are we playing this game in the first place? To be Less Dumb, of course! As you go to bed every night, if you can’t look in the mirror and say, “Today, I became Less Dumb,” then you’re not doing your job.    (LW5)

Less Dumb is the negative framing of “augmentation,” but it sounds a heckuva lot better, and it embodies the same philosophy. Tools should make people Less Dumb. Processes should make people Less Dumb. How do we measure collaboration? One way is to see if we’re Less Dumb in the process.    (LW6)

That’s obvious, you say? If it’s so obvious, why do most tools and processes make us More Dumb rather than Less Dumb? And why are we so often willing to live with that? It may sound obvious, but are we really paying enough attention to this?    (LW7)

Bootstrapping    (LW8)

With Less Dumb and Shared Language (as embodied by the Squirm Test), we have our target and the glue that keeps us together. Our process — the way we get to our target — is bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is building on top of things that already exist, then building on top of that. (The notion of bootstrapping is also the reason why we called ourselves Blue Oxen Associates.)    (LW9)

The most vivid images of my best experiences collaborating have to do with movement — my actions resulting in other people’s actions, which result in even more actions, which inspire me to act further. This is bootstrapping at its best.    (LWA)

Purple Numbers are ultimately about building ideas on top of pre-existing ideas — knowledge synthesis (i.e. becoming Less Dumb) by reusing existing ideas. Also known as bootstrapping.    (LWB)

Collaboration as a System

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I spent this past Saturday in Sebastopol “tutoring” Gail Taylor, Todd Johnston, and Tiffany Von Emmel on online Collaborative Tools. I lured Matthew O’Connor into helping by boasting of Gail, Todd, and Tiffany’s deep thinking about and practice of collaboration.    (LVC)

One of our exercises was to walk through all of our respective digital workspaces, demonstrating how we read and wrote email, and worked with online tools. I had gotten some idea of how Matthew worked when we paired at the Wikithon earlier this month, but I was still blown away by his walkthrough. He’s really thought deeply about his work processes and has optimized his online workspace accordingly.    (LVD)

Matthew expressed surprise that he was the only one who had done this, especially since I had proclaimed these folks to be gurus. I didn’t have a chance to discuss this with him on Saturday, so I thought I’d post some thoughts about that here.    (LVE)

To be good at collaboration, you have to treat it as a system. That system includes things like communication, community, Knowledge Management, learning, and leadership.    (LVF)

Most Collaborative Tools companies are either in the communication or the Knowledge Management business. They’re usually selling pipes, PIMs, or document management tools. All of those things have something to do with collaboration, but they are not in and of themselves collaboration. Then again, no tools are. A hammer is a tool for hammering, but it is not itself hammering.    (LVG)

When I think about High-Performance Collaboration, I envision groups with excellent Group Information Hygiene. Ideally, you’d also like every member of the group to have outstanding Personal Information Hygiene (like Matthew), but it’s not a prerequisite. You’d like to see every member to be past a certain threshold of competence for all aspects of the system, but I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone to be great at all those things. On a great basketball team, you’d like everyone to be in good shape and have good fundamentals, but some players are going to be superior shooters while others will be great rebounders. It’s not necessary, nor realistic, nor possibly desirable to have 12 Magic Johnsons on a team.    (LVH)

Implicit in my One Small Change post is that there is no one thing. I can think of a number of small, concrete changes that could result in significant improvements in collaboration. This is one of the main reasons why Pattern Languages — collections of named, concrete patterns — are fundamental to The Blue Oxen Way.    (LVI)

Personal Information Hygiene is a critical pattern, because it fosters trust. My advice to groups with trust issues would be to eschew squishy exercises and look at people’s Personal Information Hygiene instead. However, past a certain level, I don’t see great Personal Information Hygiene as being the primary hallmark of a great collaborator.    (LVJ)

Do NICs Exist?

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Doug Engelbart, the inspiration behind Blue Oxen Associates and one of our advisors, gave a talk for the Bay Area Future Salon last night. I’ve heard him give this talk a hundred times, but it’s always an interesting experience. I tend to pay more attention to the audience than to Doug — observing their reactions to different slides or anecdotes, listening closely to the questions.    (5US)

I also monitor my own reactions, which have become surprisingly consistent and more intense over the past few years. It not only demonstrates the key points where I differ from Doug, but also the growing convictions I have in my own beliefs. The Blue Oxen Way is heavily influenced by Doug, but it’s not identical to his way of thinking.    (5UT)

A key difference relates to Doug’s view of Networked Improvement Communities (NICs). An audience member asked whether there were any examples of NICs that currently exist. Doug said no. That’s wrong. If you listen to or read Doug’s description of NICs, then you can point to many, many examples of them. That’s not to say that all of these groups are effective NICs, but they certainly practice bootstrapping and they certainly emphasize knowledge capture and sharing.    (5UU)

The problem is not that NICs do not exist, it’s that they are not aware that they are NICs. Once they realize the importance of certain practices, they can be explicit about evaluating and improving them. The challenge is not creating NICs, it’s improving them.    (5UV)

Jamie Dinkelacker is currently writing a paper with a similar thesis, where he identifies several existing NICs and evaluates them based on Doug’s written criteria. It will be an important contribution to the literature, and I’m really looking forward to it.    (5UW)

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)