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  • Eugene Chan 4:42 am on December 20, 2013 Permalink |  

    You need 8 hours and 36 minutes of sleep for optimal performance 

    From the Wall Street Journal:

    One of the most influential studies of human performance, conducted by professor K. Anders Ericsson, found that top performers slept 8 hours and 36 minutes per day. The average American, for comparison, gets just 6 hours and 51 minutes of sleep on weeknights.

    You are simply a different person when you operate on insufficient sleep. And it shows. If you do not get enough sleep, it can lead to a cascade of negative events. You achieve less at work, skip regular exercise, and eat poorly.

    Amen.

     

    • Eugene Eric Kim 3:43 pm on December 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      We used to do these exhaustive debriefs at Groupaya, where we would pick every single possible nit about our performance. One of the patterns I noticed over time was that our performance greatly suffered when one or more of us didn’t get enough sleep the night before, were sick, or skipped breakfast.

      It sounds incredibly obvious, and yet the reality was that we were prioritizing the nits over simple fundamentals like making sure we ate before a day-long meeting. (This was my biggest problem. I’m a notorious breakfast skipper.) I’m willing to bet that this translates into the average person’s work performance in general.

      The cultural shift that needs to happen is a greater emphasis on taking care of yourself (a variation of Ground Rule #1) as a means to better work performance.

    • Eugene Chan 5:40 pm on December 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      As i get older (and maybe wiser), I’m learning that the fundamentals are more and more about doing the right things, not just doing things right. Having run a marathon or two, the comparison is apt: recovery takes longer and is just as important as training and build up.

  • Dana 9:30 pm on December 13, 2013 Permalink |  

    Echoing Eugene, thank you @jessausinheiler for sharing your Messaging framework with us! I really enjoyed thinking through the wheel and I realized I have a message for my project. Now I want to communicate it and I am feeling clearer about how to.

     

    • Jessica 5:58 pm on December 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      My pleasure to facilitate and to share Holly Minch’s framework with other bootcampers. While I can’t attach an image I took of our white board, here’s a link to a post about using Holly’s framework, for our reference: http://networksguide.wikispaces.com/4-6+Creating+shared+language+and+talking+about+networks+and+network+impact

      Re: Eugene’s comment below, had we had more time I think it would have been beneficial to try crafting a message BEFORE sharing the framework (despite the urge to talk theory first). In fact, even the ORDER in which I presented the framework mattered—it influenced how both Dana and I started crafted our messaging, which was entirely different from Eugene (we started with the “ask,” he began with the “vision”). I’ll definitely take his suggestion into account next time I design a learning exercise.

      A couple more things I learned about messaging in the course of the bootcamp: it’s totally an iterative process; the channel matters (email vs. in-person), especially for me because I have little patience for crafting (or reading) long email messages; and having a narrowly defined audience and ask is very important.

      • Eugene Eric Kim 4:23 pm on December 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I “liked” your comment already @jessausinheiler, but I just had to add how much I love these insights. Thanks for sharing!

  • Eugene Eric Kim 4:22 pm on December 13, 2013 Permalink |  

    Many thanks again to @jessausinheiler for organizing and facilitating a bootcamp this past Tuesday! So great to see everyone there! @brooking, sorry you couldn’t make it, and hoping you’re feeling better!

    Some quick thoughts on the session:

    • I loved being a participant! 🙂
    • I think Jess’s choice to do an hour-long checkin exercise up-front was a good one. It’s been over a month since we’ve all seen each other, and it was a great way to check in on our respective projects. It also shows the value of doing these things regularly. An hour-long checkin doesn’t leave much time for workouts, and I’ve found that my more involved workouts tend to require at least 90 minutes. Regular meetings mean shorter checkins.
    • I liked the messaging exercise. Jess chose to do it in a more classic explain-the-framework-first approach, which worked fine. I happen to like that framework a lot. And, I’d love to challenge any of you to redesign the exercise more bootcamp-style: practice first, then framework (if at all).

    Finally, this was another great reminder for me about the value of practice. I’ve been doing variations of these same exercises for my projects, but repeating them — especially with a community of peers — provided new value and helped me move forward in concrete ways. So thank you again!

     

    • Eugene Chan 4:28 pm on December 13, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Agreed on all points!

      And an open invitation to all Bootcampers (any cohort): we are looking at January 14th 3 to 5 as the next date/time for our community of practice. Location to be determined, but you are invited to join.

      @eekim: if there are bootcamp exercise patterns, it would be good to see them listed somewhere on the site.

      • Eugene Eric Kim 4:32 pm on December 13, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Thanks for posting about January 14! I am definitely planning on documenting patterns. And, I would be delighted if all of you shared patterns you’ve observed as well. 🙂

    • Avatar photo

      Brooking 2:20 am on December 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hey all sorry I missed it, I am still recovering a bit it’s been an epic lil sickness… was really bummed to miss the chance to re-convene. I’ve got Jan 14th on my calendar! -Brooking

      • Eugene Eric Kim 2:44 pm on December 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        No worries, @brooking. Ugh — sorry to hear you’re still sick. Glad you’ll be able to join on January 14, especially since I think you’ll be running the workout. 😉

  • Eugene Eric Kim 4:36 pm on December 9, 2013 Permalink |  

    Last week, our very own @dana facilitated her very first retreat, a two-day strategy workshop for Code for America! Here are some pictures from the event:

    Growth Toward Scale: Regionalization

    Dana, hope you’ll post some thoughts from that experiment here, or at least will talk about the experience tomorrow at the self-organized bootcamp (which I’m looking forward to)!

    Also, this morning, I published a blog post on collective intelligence, which folks here might find interesting:

    Maximizing Collective Intelligence Means Giving Up Control

    As always, feedback encouraged! If you have thoughts to share on the blog post, please post it in the comments section there. Thanks!

     

  • Eugene Eric Kim 6:00 pm on December 3, 2013 Permalink |  

    Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Two quick notes:

    First, I’m looking forward to next week’s self-organized bootcamp. Let us know where and when we’ll meet, and let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. I plan on being a participant!

    Second, I soft-launched my new work-focused website yesterday:

    Introducing Faster Than 20

    I’m planning on being very intentional about sharing useful stories about collaboration, and I want this to be a forum for my community as well. That includes all of you!

    Some of you have said you want to hear more from me. If there’s specific stuff you’d like me to share, let me know, and I’ll post it there. (For example, I might take my super long response to @brooking’s question about online engagement and turn that into a blog post.)

    I hope to see many of you there as well, either engaging in the comments or writing guest posts.

     

  • Eugene Eric Kim 3:54 pm on November 27, 2013 Permalink |
    Tags:   

    I just learned that Chris Argyris passed away a few weeks ago. Chris was a giant in organizational development. He coined the term and described the concept, “Ladder of Inference,” a tool that we used often at Groupaya. Here’s a link to one of his many classic Harvard Business Review articles, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn.”

    I would have expected the New York Times to have printed an obituary for him, but they did not. Says something about the limited awareness that people have of our field.

     

  • Eugene Eric Kim 5:47 pm on November 23, 2013 Permalink |
    Tags:   

    Here’s a related, but divergent followup to the world’s largest comment I left in response to @brooking’s questions. While I was pulling up links to some of my stories, I found some other posts that strongly color how I think about online tools and their role in collaboration.

    Here’s one on differentiating engagement from artifact. Here’s one on stigmergy (i.e. leaving trails).

    Here’s a 12-minute slidecast I put together three years ago that pulls together these different topics:

    As always, feedback encouraged!

     

    • Jessica 8:17 pm on November 25, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      A quick point about engaging busy people in response to @brooking and @eekim, via an anectode: I was at the airport and felt compelled to answer your conversation thread. I tried for 10 minutes to log in via iPhone, but finally got frustrated and gave up. It may be obvious, but it’s so much easier when friends ping you in a way that’s easy to respond. Technology is getting there, but there are still plenty of barriers.

      Eugene, how do sites like https://mural.ly/ change your perception of online vs. in-person engagements? I’m thinking about taking a systems class at Worscester Polytechnic Institute, and was told that the school has “quite a vibrant online community”… I’ll report back on what I learn re: best practices for getting people to actually and meaningfully engage online.

      Jess

      • Eugene Eric Kim 11:15 pm on November 25, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        It’s not obvious, @jessausinheiler. An amazing number of people do not pay attention to things like login usability — including online retailers, whose businesses depend on these sorts of things.

        I did a collective visioning project last year with several Alameda-based arts organizations, and we wanted to use a blog for participants to share their thoughts online. We picked Tumblr for a variety of reasons, and then we sat some participants down in front of it and asked them to log in and post something. It was brutal. No one could figure out how to log in without our help.

        These were not stupid people. They were just normal. Online tools require a mental model that does not map to what most normal people understand. The notion of online identity is particularly broken.

        When these things crop up, you don’t just give up, but you do have to get real about expectations. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. They don’t adjust.

        When I started working on the Delta Dialogues (@dana’s bootcamp project), @rapetzel and I mapped out a strategy for how we might integrate online tools. We ended up doing two things: We had a project blog that was public, and we implemented a buddy system for people to interact with each other however they chose — phone, face-to-face, etc. — between meetings. We shared artifacts from the meeting as printable PowerPoints (although we also published them online for transparency purposes). We did not try to implement some kind of online tool system so that people could interact between meetings, although I had originally thought we might go in that direction in Phase 2. I didn’t think our participants would be ready for it, and we had too many other priorities.

        As it turned out, our participants were even less ready than I thought they would be. Several of our participants (mostly government officials) had their secretaries print out their emails so they could read them, which made sending links completely useless. One of the participants shared his email account with his wife.

        So our strategy ended up being a good one, but it was not easy. For whatever reason, I find that people still have a lot of trouble getting why we approached things this way and how they might proceed moving forward. This is a common problem, not just with the Delta Dialogues, but with just about every project I’ve been involved with. It’s why I find the physical thought experiment so useful. If you imagine a special room where people could interact, but only if they figured out a puzzle lock that on average on 10 percent of participants even had the patience to try, what kind of engagement should you realistically expect, and how might you modify your design as a result?

        Given all this, Jess, how do tools like mural.ly change your perception of online vs face-to-face engagement? 🙂

    • Jessica 6:13 am on December 5, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      It really depends on the length of the engagement and my goals.

      So, an unlikely but extreme example, if the group was a global group of people who’s only chance of accomplishing their goals, given the budget, was to communicate virtually, I’d probably make a really big investment to teach them how to use the tool. For example, at the kickoff meeting I might organize a simulation exercise where people have to post / respond / comment on the site in real time, in pairs or triads, so they learn how to use the site together and from each other’s mistakes–and so they get a sense of how valuable of a tool it can be. Between bi-annual meetings, on a predictable/regular basis, I might post questions on the site (or have people take turns posting questions) that participants have 24-48 hours to respond to, to keep the momentum going. (In Murally this might mean posting an idea that others can build and comment on.)

      Is fun, instructive, collaborative up-front investment… and then time-bound, regular, predictable, valuable virtual engagement periods… really enough though?

      I pun it to other changemakers.

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    Brooking 1:14 am on November 23, 2013 Permalink |  

    Hey there bootcampers. I’m conscious of my commitment to write weekly not being met this past week, but I’ve been pondering offline a bit. One question that comes up for discussion is actually directly related to this: how do you keep busy people engaged in this sort of thing? What kinds of hooks could we institute to lure each other in to conversation? How can we make accountability easy? The topic of accountability has come up a lot this past week for me – working with busy leaders either as employee or as coach, also having managed online websites before that are only as valuable as the experience created by users… how do you support engagement without hand-holding? How do we inspire each other to want to participate? How can community hold us accountable and how can we hold ourselves accountable? Just seed planting right now – all questions, no answers 🙂 perhaps the topic of week 2 of our next set of gatherings!?

     

    • Eugene Eric Kim 5:39 pm on November 23, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Lots of great, intertwingled questions here! I’m going to try to unwind them a bit and offer some rambling thoughts. I’d love to hear what others think as well.

      I want to put aside the “accountability” questions aside for a second and focus on your questions about engagement. This is also a great opportunity for me to re-introduce the thought experiment from my failed workout from bootcamp #2. 🙂

      Pick a group that you’d like engaged in continuous conversation. Imagine that everyone in that group was in the same physical place all-the-time. They all work in the same building, they all hang out in the same neighborhood, they all live a few minutes away from each other.

      How would you like this group to engage? What kinds of interactions would you like them to have? How might you design for that?

      And how would you answer your other questions above in this situation?

      The reason I love this thought experiment is that it eliminates a lot of assumptions we make about online tools and forces us to focus on more critical design questions. What is it that you want people to actually do? Why? How are they going to make time for it? (Group physics!) Brooking asked how to keep busy people engaged. Creating an online space doesn’t change the fact that those people are busy. In fact, it often exacerbates the problem.

      Some rambly stories that might shed some light on these questions:

      I love the potential of this water cooler to build and maintain community for all of you (and perhaps beyond — an epic goal), but that’s not it’s primary purpose. The purpose of this space is to be a safe space for you to exercise your online engagement muscles. One of those muscles is sharing in public. When you share in public, you create the opportunity for connection. Your assumptions about what would be most valuable to share may not be right.

      Five years ago, I was working with a network of leaders in reproductive and population health on the ground in five different developing countries. I spent three weeks in three of those countries (India, Ethiopia, and Nigeria), blogging extensively and taking pictures throughout.

      When I got back home from my first trip, one of my colleagues on the project said to me, “Honestly, I didn’t read all of your blog posts, but I loved your pictures!” That turned out to be a common theme.

      Several months after the project was over, I checked in with a network leader in Nigeria, and she told me an interesting story. It turns out that my pictures had turned out to be an extraordinary tool in forging stronger connections. Participants in the network — who were spread out across the country and who did not have easy access to the Internet at the time — would visit Internet cafes and Google themselves out of curiosity. Since most of these folks didn’t have much of an Internet presence, not many things would show up. Many of the top hits turned out to be my pictures. Seeing those pictures struck an emotional chord, and it ended up being an impetus for people to proactively reach out to each other via mobile.

      None of this was by design. I was taking pictures because I like taking pictures, and because I was visiting new places. I tagged and shared them publicly out of habit. In the end, my pictures contributed more to catalyzing the network than the thousands of words I had written had.

      (Here are two posts from my Nigeria trip.)

      This past week, I posted a picture on Flickr, and I tagged it, “Richmond District.” The person who runs the Richmond District blog (Sarah B.) saw it, liked it, and decided to republish it. I happen to know Sarah, but I didn’t reach out to her about my picture. It didn’t even occur to me. She found it, because she follows the “Richmond District” tag on Flickr.

      As it turns out, there was a woman who used to work for Hawaii Community Foundation (one of my former clients) who saw it. She had participated in two of my processes there, and she was fantastic. She had left her job there earlier this year to have her second child, and unbeknownst to me, she had moved back to SF, which was where she grew up. She saw the picture, realized that I was in the neighborhood, and reached out to me. We have a ton of colleagues in common, but it was my sharing a random picture that resulted in this re-engagement!

      When we design engagements outside of meetings, focusing on in-depth conversation might not actually be the most useful thing we can do. Creating space to share “trivial things” can sometimes be far more effective at catalyzing conversation. That resulting conversation can happen in any number of other places — coffee shop, phone, or some online space we’re already using. It doesn’t have to be in a space that we create.

      Another muscle I want you all to work out is the muscle to respond to other people online in a timely manner. Responding quickly, in this case, is more important than responding deeply. (This should not always be the case, but it’s a useful muscle to develop.) Shockingly, feedback encourages engagement! In an online space, feedback can come in many different forms, but the simplest — and least tool-dependent — is to simply reply to someone’s comment, even if it’s just to say, “Right on, sister!”

      There are a whole bunch of other interventions you can leverage as well. One is to start with a small, committed group, and get them to commit together to read and respond to each other’s work. (Now we’re getting into the accountability question.) Not only does that group develop its own online engagement muscles, but it also attracts other participants, because shockingly, people would rather go places where conversation is happening than talk to themselves in the quiet corner of the room with a bunch of empty chairs. The IISC blog is a great example of this. The vast majority of commenters are other people at IISC, but it shows that they at least are reading and responding to each other’s work internally, and that encourages people from outside of the organization to participate as well.

      I designed and led the Wikimedia strategic planning process from 2009-2010. One of the most important and misunderstood process piece was our weekly office hours. My facilitator and I held regular office hours (rotating every other week to accommodate different timezones) on the #wikimedia channel on IRC. We did it on IRC, because that’s where Wikimedians liked to hang out. (I personally am not fond of IRC.)

      These were not meetings. There were no agendas. There was no requirement for “serious conversation.” This was me and my facilitator hanging out with people, answering questions, but mostly getting to know people in the community and vice-versa. Honestly, it was grueling, not because we didn’t enjoy the interaction, but because the overall process was so intense and because these office hours happened at strange hours.

      A few months into the process, my facilitator and I were running out of steam and were questioning whether to continue them. If we had just gone with how we were feeling, we would have stopped. But we looked at the data. And the data showed that people were coming to office hours, and that people who participated in office hours were more likely to engage in the topical conversation that was happening on the wiki. It validated the basic premise of our design: Relationship is often a greater motivation for engagement than content. These office hours were designed to build relationships, and they drove a lot of engagement that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.

      Facebook is the prime example of this. They are demolishing traditional “laws” of online engagement, like the 90-9-1 rule, because interactions follow relationships, not the other way around.

      Finally, a thought on why and how I engage online. I love having deep conversations with great people, and I like to write. However, I would still rather have coffee with someone or talk over the phone (most of the time) than exchange long emails. Sometimes, it’s not practical, so asynchronous tools allow me to have conversations I want or need to have with people far and wide, whenever I’m available.

      But that actually only accounts for a tiny percentage of my online presence. I use online tools to help me get clear about what’s swimming in my head. When I do it in public, then those thoughts become persistent, meaning I can just point people to them in the future rather than restating them over and over again. So engaging online helps me get clear and it also ends up saving me time.

      A simple takeaway from this is to find things that you are already doing, and simply do it in public. I know a bunch of people who journal to get clear. Instead of journaling in private, journal in public! (This takes practice.) Or instead of sending a long email to one person, write a blog post so that anyone can see what you’ve written.

      Returning to Brooking’s questions, what’s the motivation behind wanting online engagement? When you’re clear on this and when you think about engagement systemically (e.g. not just about meetings or “traditional” conversations, regardless of the medium), then the possible strategies and interventions become much more clear.

      • Avatar photo

        Brooking 11:35 pm on November 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        RIght on, Brother! 😉 Thanks for thoughtful response Eugene, much appreciated.

        • Eugene Eric Kim 4:51 pm on November 25, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          You’re welcome. And great exercising of the quick acknowledgement muscle! 🙂

  • Eugene Eric Kim 1:08 am on November 22, 2013 Permalink |  

    Just to let you all know, all of the exit interviews are now up. You can enjoy them in their entirety at:

    http://changemakerbootcamp.com/bootcamps/exit-interviews/

    Looking forward to hearing more about December 10!

     

  • marie 11:26 pm on November 14, 2013 Permalink |  

    Replies and future workouts 

    First of all – HELLO EVERYONE! Love that bootcampers new and old are hopping on here and keeping active.

    I keep trying to reply to threads below and it won’t let me, so I’m starting a new post. In response to @eekim, @eugenechan, @rapetzel, and @brooking –

    BATNA = Best Alternative to Negotiation (Agreement?) – basically your own personal line in the sand. I’ve had that in my head for a while but don’t think I’ll need to follow through as there’s definitely movement from management now as we get close to the end of 2013. I’ll let you all know if/when all is official!

    I love the idea of doing a narrowing workout – maybe this will be my topic when I facilitate one of our follow up sessions! Would love to explore the idea with all of you. [And I’ll probably hit you up for some help with design @eekim :)]

    Finally (for now 🙂 )I am definitely committed to trialing a 5 week follow up bootcamp where we all get together and take turns planning workouts with support from each other as needed. I love the idea of jam sessions too, but am unsure what that would look like – and maybe that’s the point? No matter what, I look forward to working with you all on a more continuous basis to practice and learn from each other.

     

    • Eugene Eric Kim 1:03 am on November 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Thanks for the update, Marie! You’re rapidly becoming our most active poster. 😉

      Sorry about the issue with commenting. I think I fixed it, but you should test it to make sure it works.

      Always available to help designing workouts and supporting all of you in your changemaker goals.

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