Faster Than 20

Last month, I went to New York and D.C. to attend two meetings that, on the surface, could not have been more different. The first was a tour of land owned by Black farmers in rural upstate New York, which I was attending specifically to see The Center for NuLeadership’s inspiring project, The People’s Land. The second was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the similarly inspiring Intellipedia, held in an “undisclosed,” high-security NSA building in Maryland. The fact that I had been invited to either of these meetings felt unlikely and was reason enough to go. What I didn’t expect was realizing that these two groups had a lot more in common than was evident at first glance. For one, they were all patriots — real patriots, who cared deeply about this country and were trying to make it better for everybody. They were also all systems thinkers and change agents who fundamentally understood the value of community and collaboration, but were in environments that actively discouraged these things. Despite this, they persist and are succeeding, even if this success continues to be tenuous. Intellipedia In 2006, Mark Oehlert, who was then at Booz Allen Hamilton, invited me to participate in a workshop he was organizing for the CIA to talk about the then nascent world of blogs and wikis — how they were being used in companies and the world at large as well as potential hazards and impacts. A year earlier, CIA analyst, Calvin Andrus, had written a white paper entitled “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community” that was stirring things up internally. The notion that intelligence agencies (where “need to know” is the mantra and where employees are regularly strapped to polygraph machines to maintain their security clearance) might adopt tools that encouraged openness and trust would have seemed ludicrous at any other time. However, the failures that led to 9/11 five years earlier still weighed heavily on these agencies, and there were rising sentiments — both top-down and bottom-up — that our national security depended on their ability to collaborate more effectively. In a typical organizational way, the agency sought external “experts” to help them better understand what was happening, even though Andrus’s paper signaled that there were already people internally who understood these tools. Unbeknownst to us, some of these folks had already started actively experimenting with an internal wiki, which they dubbed “Intellipedia” and which ran on the same open source software that ran Wikipedia. Several people had already embraced it, while many others were either mystified or upset about its existence. During our 2006 workshop. I noticed a few people sitting close to the front who kept squirming or nodding vehemently when we would say certain things. I finally pointed to them and said, “You seem to really want to say something. What are you thinking?” It turned out they were Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, the creators of Intellipedia, and they had plenty of insightful thoughts to share. I loved learning about the project, how people were using it internally and the challenges they were facing. The conversation was convivial and, at times, combative, and I learned a lot that day. This burgeoning group of internal activists was trying to do what felt impossible — create an open, collaborative platform inside of a necessarily secretive organization — and they were succeeding, despite severe pushback. Because of my roots in wiki culture, I felt a natural kinship to these folks, and they even gifted me a coveted Intellipedia spade, which I still have and treasure. That was my only “official” connection to the project, a tenuous one at best. I kept in touch with Don and Sean over the years, but I was still surprised and flattered to receive an invitation to the 20th anniversary celebration. They often credited that 2006 workshop with internally validating the work they were doing, which helped them overcome some internal obstacles. Having experienced these kinds of organizational politics many times over the years, I have no doubt that this was true, but I also suspect that they would have found a way to succeed regardless. Still, the fact that this lone touchpoint merited an invitation showed how much they valued contributions of all kinds, how they saw the whole person behind a contribution, and how much they invested in relationships. I have learned over the years that these attributes are not common. They are not just a mark of someone’s goodness, but an indicator of someone who sees and understands systems and how all the different parts— many of which are invisible to most — contribute to the whole. The People’s Land Understanding whole systems and valuing relationships are also signatures of my friend, Kyung-ji Rhee, who along with Chino Hardin, runs The Center for NuLeadership on Human Justice & Healing in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. NuLeadership was founded by Eddie Ellis, who also helped launch the New York chapter of the Black Panthers. Like many Black Panthers and other Black civil rights leaders, Ellis was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. In 1969, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a crime he insists he did not commit. His horrific experiences in Attica led him to dedicating his life to exposing and dismantling the historical, economic, and racist foundations of mass criminalization and incarceration, work that he continued until his death in 2014. In addition to founding NuLeadership, he mentored generations of movement leaders, including Kyung-ji. NuLeadership is a hyperlocal organization, doing real work on the ground in Brooklyn, including forging stronger relationships. For example, in 2017, they brought together the community and the local police to discuss and prototype better ways to handle arrests for minor infractions. One community member and officer play-acted how arrests are typically handled, then walked through possible alternatives. In the process, they found an approach that met all of the different needs and discussed ways to possibly institutionalize them. A week later, that same community member was arrested as a “person of interest” for a crime that had occurred nearby. One of the arresting officers was the same person who had done the role play with this community member the prior week! While placing the handcuffs on him, the policeman whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry, I got you.” He then proceeded to loosen the handcuffs and stood by his side until the community member was released. When institutions fail us, relationships can still protect us in the short-term and change those institutions in the long-term. Over the past decade, NuLeadership has positioned itself beyond responding to harm from incarceration toward the more holistic goal of Human Justice, which for them means Human Rights and Human Development. As part of this shift, Kyung-ji and Chino started thinking about the role that disconnection played in their work — disconnection from each other, our ancestors, how things work, our food, nature. They started imagining how they might fill this void in Bedford-Stuyvesant and what it might look like to own and work their own plot of land out in the country. Two years ago, their vision became reality. They acquired 20 acres about a four-hour drive from Brooklyn, which they have dubbed “The People’s Land.” A mix of staff and community members are now living there. They have established some basic infrastructure, such as water filtration, and have started growing vegetables and flowers. The larger vision is to build a living, learning, and retreat space where people can reconnect to land, engage in food production, and experience the physical, spiritual, and political healing that comes with learning what it is like to be in right relationship with nature. They are building out every aspect of the space themselves, which is enabling them to acquire professional skills applicable both on the land and back in their communities. Two Groups That Couldn’t Be More Different or More Similar Because of my recent gardening and habitat restoration exploits, I was particularly interested in what Kyung-ji and Chino were cooking up. As I was planning my trip to D.C. for the Intellipedia celebration, I learned that The People’s Land was going to be featured on Black Farmers United NYS’s Bridging Land, Agriculture, and Communities Conference (BLACC) 2026 Farm Tour a week beforehand. It seemed too serendipitous to pass up, and I decided to fly to the East Coast early so that I could finally meet the team and see the project for myself. My connection to The People’s Land was even more tenuous than with Intellipedia. I am not a Black farmer, I don’t live in New York, and I had never worked with any of the organizations involved. I arrived at one of the stops on the tour before any of the NuLeadership team arrived, feeling like an interloper. The weather was frigid and gray, with buds barely forming on the still bare trees, but the participants on the tour made me feel warm and comfortable. Knowing that I was friends with Kyung-ji was enough for them to embrace me as one of their own. I loved getting to meet different people on the tour, to break bread with them and hear their stories. Farming is inherently hard work. It’s even harder if you’re a small, independent farm, and harder still if you’re Black and are battling deeply embedded systems of racism and a federal government that has declared war on those who are trying to fix these systems. Despite these challenges, this community is finding ways to support each other while doing amazing, important work in the process. The land was breathtakingly beautiful. Everyone on the NuLeadership team told moving stories about the challenges of living in the inner city and about how liberating it felt to be in nature and to live on and work the land. Listening to their descriptions while standing in the crisp, cool air, surrounded by singing birds and this wonderful community, I not only understood what they were saying, I could feel what they were describing. The NuLeadership team is just getting started. The soil is rough and compacted, the buildings need restoration, and they had spent the previous few months living in canvas tents through harsh winter conditions. Still, I could see how much they have already accomplished, how seamless they are as a team, and how excited they are about achieving their vision. They are already a model for others trying to do similar work. One week later, I found myself shedding layers in D.C., where the weather was in the mid-80s and the foliage was lush and in bloom. I hitched a ride with Don and two of his colleagues to the facility, which was about an hour outside of the city. The buildings were unmarked, but the high fences and armed guards suggested that this was not an ordinary place. The building itself seemed like any other nondescript, corporate space, with signs on the wall reminding people of their organizational values. Only the podium inside the lobby, the backdrop with blue and white balloons, and the large cake on the side suggested that anything out of the ordinary was happening that day. About 40 people, half of whom were no longer employees, milled around, greeting each other. Once again, I felt out of place coming into the space, but people seemed to accept me as if I were supposed to be there. I suppose the fact that I had gotten through multiple levels of security indicated that I wasn’t just a random bystander, but I think there was more to it than that. One of the core principles in the wiki world is, “Trust by default.” I think that anyone who is drawn to wikis already believes this principle, and I think that we are more inclined to form community as a result. Yes, these were spies and analysts, but they were also wiki people. Still, I was hyper conscious of where I was and of the portrait on the wall of that grotesque person who is actively trying to destroy everything I believe in. It felt somewhat jarring to hear speaker after speaker come up and extol what made Intellipedia successful and why. It was a celebration, but it was also a subtle admonition. The project has succeeded despite an overarching culture that still fears it and wants it to go away. The speakers told wonderful, self-deprecating stories, and the word “trust” came up repeatedly. As I heard them say the word again and again, I started having an out-of-body experience. I felt like I was at The People’s Land again, listening to stories from both places simultaneously. These two groups could not have been more different on the surface, and yet they were so similar in so many ways, and I felt like they were talking about the exact same things. Connecting with Each Other Can Make a Difference Why we do things matter. We humans are conditioned to accept things as “the way things are.” There is an ease and comfort to routine, especially when our day-to-day lives seem more or less okay. The act of being intentional, much less aspirational, can be an incredibly uncomfortable exercise, because it forces us to get real about the gap between what we want and how things actually are. When we do try to change things, it’s easier to rail against something that feels wrong than it is to try to build something that feels right. Both the NuLeadership team and the Intellipedia contributors have chosen to build something that feels right. Even when the rest of us claim to want the same underlying things, change threatens comfort, and for many of us, comfort is survival. My friend and colleague, Denise Collazo, likes to call the inevitable response to change as an organizational immune response. Even if something is for the better, if it’s different and uncomfortable, a group’s immune system will attack it. How things are connected to each other matter. Building something that feels right requires understanding how things are connected, and we live in a world where these connections are harder and harder to see. There is a mountain of research that shows how immersion in nature results in better health, and yet most of us have trouble believing this, because we don’t have a lived sense of it. Instead, we pour most of our money and energy into programs that are bandages, where the connection between problem and solution is shallower, but easier to see, and hence more comfortable. In order for public policy to become reality, it takes government agencies to move money and resources to people on the ground, people who often work for hyperlocal organizations like NuLeadership. These groups have miniscule budgets, which means most of us don’t realize they exist, much less the impact they have on our lives. When things break, we know whom to blame, but we rarely see the role that these groups and people play when things are working. It took a tragedy like 9/11 for many in the intelligence community to viscerally understand how the lack of collaboration could lead to American lives lost, and even this was barely enough to enable a project like Intellipedia to succeed. At the celebration, I heard speaker after speaker proudly point to the project’s impact despite ongoing resistance and minimal support. While those who helped the project succeed should feel proud, the rest of us should feel ashamed or angry when we underresource things that work. With whom we do things matter. Making positive change in the world is fundamentally hard, but both NuLeadership and Intellipedia reveal a path that can lead to success. It starts with finding your people. When we find each other and lift each other up, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. I was struck by the role that community continues to play for both of these projects, and I feel blessed to have been able to observe and experience this firsthand.

A few weeks ago, my Winter cohort of Power and Love for Managers had its final session in Oakland. We closed the training with appreciations, and one participant said how much she valued being in an “intentionally intergenerational space.” That comment struck a chord for me. It was an accurate description, but I had framed my goals around diversity more generally and around experience rather than age. I’ve been pondering why I haven’t been more explicit about bridging generations in my work, when it’s been an important value for me from the beginning. I started going down this professional path in 2002 when I was 27. The early days were rough, mainly because the economy was bad and I didn’t have a track record, at least not the kind most people were looking for. The professional field was also small and mostly ill-defined. Saying I was a “collaboration consultant” drew blank stares. There were a few similar job titles, such as leadership and organizational development consultants and facilitators, and although there was plenty of overlap, none of those things described exactly what I was trying to do or how I was trying to do it. It was a struggle simply to survive the first few years, and I could not have done so without many mentors, including Doug Engelbart, Jeff Conklin, Gail and Matt Taylor, and many others. They were generous and encouraging, but they also didn’t treat me as a charity case. They valued my experiences and how I thought about the world and the work, and they wanted to learn from me as much as they wanted to support me. These early experiences strongly influenced my theory of change as well as my personal practice. I knew what my mentors had meant to me, and I wanted to pay it forward. But I also recognized that we wouldn’t see better collaboration at a planetary-scale without many, many more skilled practitioners. Unfortunately, many who are drawn to this practice (often women and people of color) feel isolated and invisible. We don’t realize that trying to help groups collaborate more effectively is a “thing,” and that there are many others who are doing the same. If we could make the practice more visible and connected, we would all benefit. This would also mean making it easier for new people to enter the field, not just by sharing wisdom, but by creating professional opportunities where people could make a living while honing their craft. If the path to doing this work professionally is as hard as it was for me when I was younger, it will deter folks we badly need. Throughout my career, I’ve done my best to build the field through my work. I hire associates on as many projects as I can. Their roles are largely operational, not because senior practitioners are above this work (everybody on my teams “work the line”), but because I want them to value the importance of doing logistics well. Associates are also part of the design team, which means they are in most of the meetings I have with clients. I encourage them to speak up in those meetings, explaining that there is no mistake they can make that I can’t fix and that I will be more upset if they withhold an important observation or insight. Because I revoke all of my intellectual property, people who work with me are free to integrate any of our tools and practices into their own work without worrying about fees or credit. I also pay associates more than market rate, because I’ve realized that your previous paycheck has an outsized impact on how future clients see you and how much they’re willing to pay you, especially when you’re young. I’ve tried to encourage my peers to adopt some of these practices, with mixed success. More than a few colleagues have told me, “I don’t have time to train younger practitioners.” My experience with associates is that any time I invest in my them comes back to me in spades. They add a useful dose of perspective, and they provide backup in case others have to step away. They also inject energy and joy into the work, and they bring their own unique skills and perspectives, providing the rest of the team fresh opportunities to learn. More recently, as I’ve tried to shift more of my focus on training, I’ve had fewer opportunities to hire associates. I’ve tried to make up for this by making my trainings free to folks who are 26 years old or under. Despite my emphasis on supporting less experienced practitioners, until recently, I didn’t think of myself as an “older” practitioner. I think what’s different now — besides turning 50 last year — is that many of the kids in my life are now young adults. Before, I didn’t really look at people in their 20s much differently than I looked at myself. Sure, I was older, but they were essentially still peers. Now, I can’t help seeing them and thinking, “Wow, that person is the same age as my nephew!” I’m also acutely aware of how different the world is now from what it was a quarter century ago — darker, more volatile, more uncertain. I can only imagine what it must be like to have to face this as a 20-year old, and I feel a greater responsibility to support them. It was so much easier when I could just blame the Boomers! Fortunately, the benefits of being in intergenerational spaces are bidirectional. In this month’s Staying Strategic workouts at my Collaboration Gym, I had two people in their 20s participate. They also happened to be children of friends and colleagues, one of whom I’ve known since he was 10. I loved having them. They were thoughtful, earnest, vulnerable, eager to learn and engage, but also willing to contribute. The energy was different with them in the room, and I could see how much everyone else loved working out with them. The same was true with my Winter cohort of Power and Love for Managers, where a third of our participants were in their 20s. Being around younger practitioners lifts my mood, challenges my thinking, and gives me hope. If they are this smart, this curious, this good, then we have a fighting chance to make things better in this world. It behooves the rest of us to do whatever we can to help them. Intentionally creating and being in intergenerational spaces is a great way to do this. Photo by Zoha Raza.

A few years ago, I took an introductory class on Bonsai, the art of growing miniaturized trees in pots. The first thing they taught us was that, with the exception of tropical species, trees needed to be kept outside. Why? Because trees sleep during the winter, and if they are constantly kept awake with artificial light and heat, they will eventually die. It made sense once I understood the reasoning, but I would not have intuited this on my own. I’m clearly not alone, judging from the countless number of posts on various Bonsai forums from folks who are mystified as to why their trees, which they tended to lovingly indoors, end up dying. I’m sure some of this is because of general nature blindness, but I think another factor is society’s dysfunctional relationship to rest. I was reminded of this when a friend was telling me about how the leaders at her work — a large tech company with thousands of employees — are constantly throwing around the word “velocity.” All of the internal messaging is about going faster, never easing up. Not surprisingly, there is a high-level of both burnout and apathy there. When urgency feels artificial, people tune it out. I’ve seen similar cultures at countless nonprofits, but for different reasons. The stakes feel higher, because people’s lives often depend on the work. Resources tend to be scarce, but leaders look to do more with less rather than invest in greater capacity. The resulting burnout is predictable, and yet the cycle has proven difficult to break. Most recently, I’ve been hearing about a new, but similarly pernicious pattern induced by artificial intelligence. Despite AI’s promise to do our hard work for us, people who are using it regularly often find themselves even more exhausted. My friend, Greg Gentschev, recently observed: The funny thing about using AI for projects is that I feel decision fatigue. Everything gets done so fast that it’s hard to keep up. I think this is going to be a common complaint going forward. Using AI can feel like managing a bunch of mostly competent, very fast interns who work nonstop, 24-hours each day. There are more to things to review, more things to respond to, more decisions to make, and no natural barriers (like your team needing to sleep) to stem the tide. We’re like those poor Bonsai trees being kept awake by artificial light and heat. We, too, need to rest, or else we, too, will die. It’s crazy that anyone would feel compelled to explain this core human need, but the pace of de-humanization in our society is bringing new meaning to “velocity.” So what can we do about this? First and foremost, we can re-assess the stories we tell ourselves. As everyone who is actually a high-performer at their craft knows, sustainability and “velocity” are not at odds with each other. Ask any marathon runner. Rest and recovery, along with mental and emotional well-being, are critical for us to be at our best. Telling ourselves otherwise is not only counter-productive, it establishes the foundation of a toxic culture. Second, we can name our intentions clearly. In my work with groups, I often see leaders confuse poor habits with lack of agency. We tend to replicate what we’ve experienced. If no one before us models a healthy, balanced culture, we’re unlikely to do otherwise, regardless of what we actually want. We assume that everything is the way they are, because that’s the only way they can be, when in reality, we tend to have more choices than we realize. Which leads to the third and most important thing we can do: Establish new habits. My training, Power and Love for Managers, along with my work with dysfunctional teams, focuses on establishing Working Agreements and thinking through structures and processes that support them. If your intention is to create an environment that feels welcoming and supportive, then how you onboard new team members or how you run your meetings matter. Being super clear about roles and having clear cycles of stress and recovery will do way more for achieving human “velocity” than excessively preaching about it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go fast. Indeed, sometimes our work requires it. But “velocity” doesn’t require shedding our humanity. Leaning into what actual human beings need to go fast will do wonders for your group’s culture and results.

Nine years ago, I found myself hiking through the Kentucky Appalachians foraging for ginseng with my then 75-year old mother. She had met a dealer in Los Angeles who spent half the year in Kentucky foraging for the precious root and who occasionally brought others along on his expeditions. My mom wasn’t in the best of health, but she decided she wanted to do this, and when she gets an idea in her head, she is stubborn and resolute. I was worried about her physical condition, and I also found the idea of trekking through the Kentucky woods in autumn irresistible, so I offered to go with her. Our guide was a retired Korean building contractor in his 60s who loved the clean air and solitude of the Kentucky mountains and who had turned his foraging hobby into a side hustle. I wondered how this man, who was decades older than me, managed to leave me huffing and puffing in his trail as he effortlessly scurried up and down the mountainside. I marveled at how he casually scoured the forest floor, quickly spotting the ginseng plant’s trademark leaves among the hundreds of other plants that looked exactly like it, while also managing to maintain his overall bearings. I also marveled at my mom, but for different reasons. It wasn't because she was fearlessly forging off the trail and into the woods, despite her physical condition, in single-minded pursuit of her goal. That was very familiar to me. No, I was surprised because she was letting me help her. My mom is simultaneously the most stubbornly independent and self-sacrificial person I know — self-reliant to a fault, yet unwilling to take care of herself. For as long as I could remember, every time I or my sisters ever tried to help her — carrying her bags, for example — she would fight us tooth and nail. She tried to teach us to follow her lead. “You can’t depend on others,” my mom would explain. “No one is going to help you in this country.” Given how she raised us, it was something for her to let me help her on this trip so overtly, whether it was holding her hand on treacherous inclines or making sure she took enough breaks and drank enough water. Five years earlier, all of this would have been a non-starter. By all accounts, my mom had a steely will from birth. Up until the Korean War, her childhood had been happy, full of family and friends, and her parents — my grandparents — had been active in their community. Then, when she was 11 years old, the North Koreans kidnapped her father. Eight decades later, we still don’t officially know what happened to him, but he was almost certainly murdered. Her mother died a year later. Becoming a war-time orphan was horrific enough, but what defined that moment for her was that she felt like her extended circle — and later, her siblings — let her down when she needed them the most. She stopped trusting people after that. The heart of Kentucky is sparsely populated, with limited cell phone coverage and miles separating many from their closest neighbors. Our guide had a cabin in Stanton, a tiny community that was largely off the grid. Gallons of drinking water and boxes of canned and freeze-dried food lined his kitchen, as the closest grocery store was almost an hour away. People didn’t seem to ask for help around there, if only because everything and everybody was so far away. Still, there were signs of connection and community, from churches to repair shops to the restaurants further out. Every day, as we set out for the woods, we would drive past a cemetery on the outskirts of town. I wondered what it was like to have the graves of people you had known your whole life on the periphery of your consciousness every single day. Stanton felt representative of Kentucky in many ways. A third of the state’s population live below the poverty line, almost triple the national median of 13 percent. Of the 30 poorest counties in the U.S., nine hail from Kentucky, with as many as 45% of the population living in poverty. If you peek a little closer — unemployment, education, mortality, obesity, disability — the story is even more grim. Kentucky is regionally part of what public health officials colloquially call the “Stroke Belt” and “Coronary Valley” for its high rate of poor health. A state with as many challenges as Kentucky naturally needs as much help as it can get. In 2022, 38 percent of its revenue came from federal funds, second in the nation and ten percentage points above average. For every dollar of Medicaid coverage disbursed in the state, the U.S. government pays 71 cents, the sixth highest amount in the country. More than almost every other state, Kentucky depends on everyone else, but folks there don’t realize it. A 2016 survey showed that only 16 percent of Kentucky residents knew that the federal government covered most of their Medicaid bills. I could understand why the residents of Stanton might be distrustful of outside forces. My mom had taught me to be the same way, albeit in different circumstances. I had learned from her difficult experiences, and I understood the consequences of depending on others, only to have them let you down. So I tried not to feel too self-conscious as people’s eyes followed us everywhere we went, undoubtedly processing the sight of a Korean-American and his immigrant companions speaking mostly in a foreign tongue. It was harder the deeper we went into the countryside, as I was conscious of more than a few Confederate flags flying openly in people’s yards. Still, people there minded their own business, and when they did engage, they were respectful. Everyone seemed particularly courteous around my mom and our elderly guide, something I don’t always feel at home in San Francisco or in other coastal cities. There is a long tradition in Kentucky of foraging for wild ginseng, and it epitomizes how complicated self-reliance can be. The plant takes several years to sprout, and its five-leaf pattern is hard to spot on the dense forest floor. Deer and turkeys enjoy nibbling on the leaves and bright red berries, making it even harder to find. Ginseng foraging requires skill and perseverance, but for the 'sangers in Kentucky, it almost feels like a birthright. People there — including the famed frontiersman, Daniel Boone — have been supplementing their incomes with the wild root since the 1700s. For those skillful enough to do it, it’s a profitable endeavor. The root garners anywhere from $50 to $800 a pound, depending on its age and quality. Brent Bailey, the Executive Director of West Virginia Land Trust, found a positive correlation between ginseng harvests and the state's unemployment rate. "The forests are a social safety net in Appalachia," he toldThe New York Times. "Ginseng is Plan B for many households." For something to garner such a high price means that someone out there is willing to pay it. In the case of ginseng, those feisty customers don’t live in Kentucky or any other state for that matter. They live in Asia. Ginseng has been a prized medicinal root there for centuries, so much so that it is almost impossible to find in the wild there anymore. That makes the Kentucky root all the more precious. Even back in 1824, the U.S. exported 750,000 pounds of ginseng across the Pacific. It’s safe to say that without Asia, there would be no Plan B. Ginseng played a large role in my childhood, and not in a good way. When I was a kid, my mom often complained that I lacked energy. Her solution was to force me to drink ginseng tea every day. She would pour a heaping spoonful of this chalky, pungent powder into a tiny cup of hot water, and I would do my best to gag it down, whining and crying the whole time. As I got older, I got better at gulping it down, but I still found it vile, and I violently disagreed with her premise as to why I needed to drink it in the first place. I stopped drinking it as soon as I left for college, and I did my best to forget this childhood ritual. But after graduating, I noticed that I often felt lethargic. Every time I noticed this, I was reminded of what my mom would say to me when I was younger. After a few months of feeling low energy, I swallowed my pride and asked her to send me some of the herb. The tea she sent me wasn’t as strong as what I had drunk as a child, and I used a lower concentration. It felt palatable and familiar, and I was surprised by how comforting it felt to drink. After a few weeks, I felt like my lethargy was going away. But there was more to this story. My first few months after college were the least active period of my life. I was living in a strange place, and I barely knew anyone. I would roll out of bed in the morning, get in my car, and drive to work, where I would spend all day in front of my computer. After work, I would drive home, often stopping for fast food, and would spend my evenings reading or watching TV before going back to bed. By the end of that summer, I had gained 20 pounds. When I think back to that time, I think of how things started to change for me when I started drinking that tea. But it’s also possible that the lethargy started going away because I was shocked by how my clothes no longer fit, and I started consciously finding ways to move again. It’s possible that running into an old high school friend and getting invited to a weekly basketball game had more to do with the shift in my energy than the medicinal root I had once again begun to ingest. Everything is possible. All I know is, almost 30 years later, I still drink ginseng tea every day. The stories we tell ourselves are powerful, especially when they are forged in trauma. But there are always other stories too. On the surface, these stories may seem to contradict each other, but in reality, the truth is in the tension. The residents of Stanton, Kentucky are incredibly independent, and they also rely on the federal government more than others. Foraging for ginseng enables people to support themselves through their own skill and industry, and it’s a profitable endeavor because of the huge demand for ginseng in countries thousands of miles away. My adult ritual of drinking ginseng tea every morning coincided with a feeling of energy and well-being, and the chemical makeup of the root itself may have had little to do with why. My mom does not trust other people, and she taught us to do the same. But in teaching us to be self-reliant, she also encouraged us to think for ourselves. I saw firsthand what it looked like to live in a world without trust and community, and I sought an alternative. Ironically, I ended up finding the story I was seeking from — you guessed it — my mom. As much as she raised me and my sisters to be self-reliant, she also taught us to support each other. She modeled what it looked like to have each other’s backs and to take care of each other no matter what the circumstances. She also encouraged us to make and spend time with friends, even if she didn’t do so herself, explaining, “We need other people.” She often told us stories about her older brother — our uncle — who passed away last year. He was sociable and curious, and he made friends easily. He also loved traveling the world and experiencing different cultures, and because he had so many friends in so many places, he rarely stayed in hotels. “You can’t depend on others.” “We need other people.” What does it look like to calibrate seemingly contradictory stories and to find the balance between them? I’m still trying to figure this out, both personally and professionally, but I think it starts by becoming aware of these stories and by acknowledging and respecting their truth, even if there’s more that needs to be explored. Gray can’t exist without both black and white. I’ve been helping groups collaborate for almost as long as I’ve been consuming ginseng of my own volition. From the beginning, my practice was based on the premise that we are better and smarter together. I know this to be true. I know that this is not only a better, more desirable way to live, it is a necessary way to be in today’s world, where our most complex challenges are rapidly outpacing our ability to address them. I’m also stubbornly independent, like my mom, and as much as I’m willing to help others, I hate asking others for help. And so I continue to learn and to calibrate. More recently, I’ve been leaning into the story, “We need other people,” in both small and big ways. I’ve been calling up friends and family, asking them simply to be present with me when I need to do something difficult, whether it’s weeding my garden or cleaning my office or designing a new training. My bike got a flat the other day, and rather than take it to a shop or sift through YouTube trying to learn how to fix it myself, I had a friend show me how to do it. I’m not going to pretend that the shame of needing help has completely gone away. But to my surprise, I’ve found that people like helping their friends and that asking for help builds community. We all feel closer to each other, and we all feel less alone. I’ve been telling a story like this for over 20 years, and yet it feels like I’m learning this lesson for the first time. My mom is still as stubborn as always, maybe even moreso. But in our time foraging through the Kentucky woods together, I realized that, as powerful and as true as the stories we tell ourselves are, we also have the ability to lean into the tension, to explore the nuances, and to find a better balance for ourselves and for others. If she can do it, I can do it too. We all can.

Card by Lindsey Elias. Photograph by Dharmishta Rood. In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment. —Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) Earlier this year, my partner and I were spending an evening with friends, enjoying a beautiful dinner. We mostly avoided talking about current events, but eventually, one of them asked us how we were grappling with our nation’s turn toward authoritarianism and our federal government's attack on much of what we care about and believe in. In truth, I was dealing with it by avoiding these conversations when I could. However, I felt that these friends knew me well enough, both personally and professionally, for me to answer without having to explain myself too much. So I told them that I was dealing with it by going to the nearby hills every Sunday and weeding. The Birds and the Bugs My Mom has always been an avid gardener, and she was disappointed that neither my two sisters nor I seemed to take to the practice. I killed many houseplants before giving up on them entirely. They were just too much trouble. As much as I loved being outdoors, I couldn’t tell one tree from the next. That changed for me during the pandemic lockdown. I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone other than my partner and my younger sister. We ended up spending a lot of time outdoors. And for the first time, I really started paying attention. Truly, actually paying attention. It started with the birds. I’ve always liked birds, but they were all mostly flying brown blobs to me. One day, my partner decided to fill a birdbath I didn’t even know she had because it had always been hidden by a mass of weeds. The next day, we heard something splashing around in there. That was enough for me to clear the weeds and move the birdbath somewhere visible. The payoff came quickly, and we were rewarded with the sight of a little brown blob taking a bath. I was bewitched. I sat there and watched. I listened to the water splashing as the sun faded. I noticed that this brown blob was bigger than most brown blobs I had seen. I decided to look up its name. “California Towhee.” The next day, I saw my friend perusing the yard with its mate. “Hello, Towhee,” I greeted it. It ignored me, hopping around, scratching and pecking. Once again, I sat and watched. Over time, I learned the names of other brown blobs, and I greeted them too. I watched, and I watched. I didn’t have to go out of my way to look for them, because they often were just there. Something started changing in me every time I came across these happy little critters, and I started wondering how I could attract more of them. It turns out that birds eat bugs. Lots of them. They vastly prefer them to other types of food. The best way to bring more birds to your garden is to attract more bugs. The best way to do that is to grow native plants. My previous track record with plants had me hesitant about diving in, but I was newly motivated, and I was lucky enough to have the time and the space. I scoured local nurseries and the Internet, trying to soak in everything I could find. I bought one plant at a time, put them in the ground, and did my best to keep them alive. Miraculously, most of them survived. Native plants are resilient, and they’re already adapted to our local conditions. They don’t need the rigamarole of unnatural watering regimens or soil modifications that traditional gardening requires. I mostly had to stick them in the ground, and most of them did okay. A few years into the practice, I had started to suspect that my enthusiasm for gardening and native plants was more of a dalliance than a passion. I appreciated everything that gardening had done for me, but I wasn’t sure how much more time I wanted to invest into it. Weeding, in particular, felt like just another maintenance task that I was mostly failing at. A Beautiful Discovery When my partner and I first met, she introduced me to Skyline Gardens in the hills just outside of Berkeley, California. We didn’t know the name of the place at the time. The trail didn’t have a clear marker, and we didn’t know where it ended. We would park on the side of a road and hop a fence to reach it. It quickly became our trail, and we would walk it often. During the pandemic and my subsequent gardening deep dive, I realized to my delight that there were many beautiful native plants along the trail. I assumed that they had been there all along and that I was noticing them for the first time, but that wasn’t quite true. Most of the beautiful, “wild” spaces we enjoy are being actively stewarded, whether we realize it or not. Trails need to be cleared, weeds need to be pulled, shrubs and trees need to be pruned. It’s not just about creating lush, accessible, green spaces. It’s also about maintaining safety and balance in the ecosystem, from removing dried foliage from fire-prone areas to creating habitat for endangered pollinators. There’s so much invisible work, it’s easy to take it all for granted. But Skyline Gardens had other gifts beyond active stewardship. A combination of elevation and terrain and location, location, location has made it the most botanically biodiverse region this side of the San Francisco Bay. As someone who was nature-blind prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if an area were biodiverse or not. It all just looked like a bunch of greenery to me. Two years ago, while slowly emerging from my nature-blindness, my partner and I were walking through Skyline Gardens on a beautiful Spring day, and we decided to wander off the beaten path. We walked up a series of switchbacks through tangles of waist-high weeds and a grove of eucalyptus trees. We emerged onto a rocky ridge with panoramic views of the Bay, Oakland, San Francisco, even the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked along the ridge, skirting around thickets of coyote brush and silver bush lupine, until we suddenly came upon this high meadow. I then realized that biodiversity can look like a lot more than a bunch of greenery: Even the most nature-blind person in the world could understand, without explanation, that these fields of colorful splendor were beautiful and exceptional. What I didn’t know was that, a century and a half ago, this was actually the norm for much of California. California is known as the “Golden State,” which is mostly an allusion to the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. But it might as well be a description of the warm, ochre hues dancing across the hills throughout the state for most of the year. This is the California I grew up with, and in truth, I think it looks beautiful. But those evocative yellows also represent barrenness and destruction. It is the result of invasive grasses, mustards, and thistles that suck up moisture and nutrients, outcompeting everything else in their relentless quest to go to seed and reproduce as quickly and as bountifully as possible. Not only do their shallow roots barely sink any carbon, their short lives make the hills especially fire-prone. Before colonization and industrial agriculture, much of California looked like what Skyline Gardens looks like now. In the 1880s, the conservationist John Muir described the Central Valley as “one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than four hundred miles, your feet would press more than a hundred flowers at every step.” I had read Muir’s description years ago, but I had had trouble envisioning what it looked like. Thanks to Skyline Gardens, I no longer had to try to imagine. I could see it for myself a quick 20-minute drive from where I lived. The Downside of Vision As long as I can remember, I’ve been a visualizer. I would spend hours as a kid imagining what it might be like when I was older, how I would want to behave, what I would do in different situations. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, not exactly at least. I grew up in a middle class household in beautiful Southern California, where the sun was always shining. Both of my parents were active in our lives, I was close with my two sisters, and I made friends easily. Still, there was turmoil in my household, secondary trauma from my parents’ experiences growing up in Korea under Japanese oppression, losing close family members during the Korean War, then immigrating to this country without any kind of support system and trying to make do. My parents had a dream for me and my sisters, and they scratched and clawed and fought to try to make it a reality. They fought with people and institutions that did not necessarily like how they looked or sounded or smelled, folks who did not necessarily want them here, much less to succeed. They also fought with each other and with my sisters and me. Every day, they were tired and stressed and scared. When they didn’t know what else they could do, they yelled and screamed. Sometimes, they went beyond that. In those times, I tried to find a place where I could be alone and visualize. I often envisioned difficult situations, and I would think through how I would deal with them. In these scenarios, I always figured things out, although not necessarily easily. It was empowering and hopeful, and it not only helped me problem-solve, it made me more resilient. I first met my mentor, Doug Engelbart, in 1997, when I was in my early 20s and he was in his early 70s. Doug made my little exercises in visioning seem like child’s play. Among the many things I learned from him was that we rarely permit ourselves to truly think big. What was so unique about him was that he wasn’t a dreamer. He was a doer, and his enormous vision was his roadmap. Doug passed away in 2013, and he was depressed the entire time I knew him. Mental health is a complicated affair, and I don’t want to pretend I fully understood everything that was going on with him. What I did understand was that he had made the fate of humanity his mission in life and work, and he constantly felt like a failure as a result. His insight, first formulated in the 1950s, was simple. Problems were scaling faster than our ability to solve them. If we were to have any hope of survival, we needed to get smarter together, and fast. He made it his mission, at the ripe old age of 25, to do something about it. He approached the problem practically and systematically, taking his cues from his boyhood experiences growing up in the Oregon countryside during the Great Depression. He had a way of articulating complex ideas simply, using everyday objects to make his points: a brick, a pencil, a mirror, a bicycle. The focus of everything he envisioned was to make people’s lives better. And yet, his peers almost overwhelmingly rejected his concerns and his vision. Doug likened our situation to all of us being on a giant, Goldberg-ian contraption that was hurtling toward a steep cliff. He felt like a lone wolf, insistently pointing toward our impending doom, begging others to join him in trying to steer us back to safety. Nobody seemed to see him, much less listen to him. Even worse, many folks perceived the messenger as the bigger threat, and they did their best to marginalize him. I commissioned the amazing Brian Narelle to create this comic for Doug Engelbart’s 80th Birthday. Doug was incredibly stubborn, and he pushed forward despite the opposition. He became most famous for some of the things he invented — graphical user interfaces, hypertext, the mouse — all of which he revealed to the world in 1968 at an event that’s come to be known as The Mother of All Demos. But those of us who were lucky enough to enter his orbit knew him for and were inspired by his all-consuming mission. I hated that he felt so much despair, given all that he had accomplished and the many, many people he had inspired. In making his mission my own over twenty years ago, I swore that I would not fall into the same trap. I would remember that this could not be my mission alone, that I could not judge my success on the overall state of the world, and that I needed to right-size my expectations. And yet, even before the current shitshow that is masquerading as the United States government, I was failing at this. Belief and Despair In 2012, about ten years into my journey of helping groups collaborate more effectively, I pulled together an all-star team of practitioners to help a group of highly contentious stakeholders come to a shared understanding about one of the most intractable, some would say religious issues in the state of California: How to divvy up our limited supply of water. We succeeded, but something bothered me about our success. I wasn’t sure how much of it was due to our most sophisticated (and expensive) techniques. Much to my surprise, I also realized that our most basic interventions — ones that we often took for granted — had played a major role. These stakeholders had been more than capable of doing these basic interventions without us, which would have saved them time, heartache, and money. They just needed to realize this and believe it. I spent months pondering this, reflecting on past work and on other groups I had observed or been a part of. This led to what, in retrospect, seems like a stunningly obvious revelation: High-performing groups do all of the “basic” things well. They regularly check in with each other to get clear about what they are trying to do, how they are trying to do it, and how they are actually doing, so that they could adjust accordingly. They also treated each other like human beings as opposed to automatons or brains-on-sticks. One of the trademarks of my work up to that point was how inclusive I was. Making stakeholders co-conspirators in both the design and implementation is largely what enabled us to achieve our goals, but it had the added benefit of showing people how to do the work well. It gave them the opportunity to learn by doing, which meant they could succeed in the work well after we left. Or so I thought. It’s not that people didn’t learn something from our work together. It’s that simply going through the experience once was usually not enough for them to sustain the work on their own. I and my team had muscles that many of our clients did not, and when we went away, things usually reverted to how they were before. My revelation, obvious or not, felt like a major breakthrough, because it meant that groups didn’t have to acquire world class skills in facilitation or design or strategy or communications to be successful without us. They just had to do the basics well. Helping groups do the basics felt achievable. If I focused on this, I could be much more successful in helping groups in a way that might last. More importantly, this approach felt scaleable. Democracy requires muscles, not just structures, to succeed. The muscles required to be and work together well at small scales — with our families, our friends, our work teams — are the same muscles required to be and work together well at larger scales — in our organizations, our communities, our country as a whole. Those muscles have severely and collectively atrophied for many reasons and over many years, and it’s resulted in fascism in America today. Re-building these muscles at a small scale not only felt achievable, it felt critical in newly urgent ways. So I pivoted how I did my work. I’ve been lucky to have found groups willing to let me test and evolve this approach with them, and it’s reinforced my belief in its efficacy. But this feeling of being a failure began to accelerate over the past few years. I can think of two reasons why. First, if you’re in the business of making the world a better place, and society is going in the wrong direction, it’s hard not to feel bad about it. The problem is placing outsized responsibility on yourself. It is factually incorrect and a little narcissistic to think that any individual — even those with great structural power (which I do not have) — can have such a huge impact on our collective success or failure. I’ll call this the Doug Fallacy and hope that my mentor forgives me. It manifests in all sorts of silly ways among progressives, such as feeling guilty about driving to the convenience store instead of taking public transit or taking your kids to the park and being silly and joyous with them instead of going to a protest. Second, it’s hard to believe in the power of relentlessly and collectively doing the basics over and over again, especially when the world (or even just your job) feels like a tire fire around you. When you’re on a team, and things have been falling apart for a while now, and you’re struggling to do your job while immersed in toxicity and dysfunction, it’s hard to believe that having regular team checkins over the next year or so will help correct the problems. Or, if you’re a social justice organization, and your communities are under constant attack, and all of your government grants have been cut because you had the word, “diversity,” on your website, and now you’ve had to let go of a quarter of your staff who were already overworked and burnt out, it’s hard to believe that aligning around priorities and checking in on them regularly over the next year or so will help correct the problems. I get this, and I’ve tried my best to be empathetic and to meet groups where they are. But I also know that most groups (just like people) are inclined to skip steps and that skipping steps will not lead to success. I think I’m better than most at holding my ground with groups, but I still relent more often than I would like, and the results are predictable. I feel guilty and responsible, and then the Doug Fallacy creeps in again, and the bad feelings start to spiral. These feelings aren’t just bad for my mental health. They’re bad for the work. Good Energy Skyline Gardens was founded by Glen Schneider, a retired landscaper. In 2016, while walking the trail, Glen noticed that the local municipal district, which owns the land, was removing a grove of Eucalyptus trees. He knew that when the trees were removed, the land underneath would be newly exposed to sunlight and that invasive plants would quickly take over. So he started to weed. Over time, the municipal district discovered what he was doing, and rather than raise a fuss, they encouraged him. Skyline Gardens became a sanctioned project. Almost a decade later, dozens of volunteers come there weekly to help restore the land. Last Spring, I and others were invited to walk the space with Glen. I didn’t know anything about him other than that he had founded the project, but I was anxious to learn as much as I could from him about this place that I loved. I had low expectations. I had been to other native plant gatherings, and while people were generally pleasant enough, I didn’t feel any affinity toward most of them. People rarely introduced themselves, much less asked about me or my interests, even when there were only a few others around. I felt tolerated, not welcomed, and I got the sneaky feeling that most of these enthusiasts preferred plants to people. Everyone seemed so much older (thought I, a member of the half-century club) and whiter. This walk felt different from the start. The group was more diverse than I had seen at other gatherings. To my surprise, Glen even kicked things off with introductions! We started up a fire road to the top of a ridge, giving us gorgeous views of the hillsides below us. Then we made our way down to the trail below — my and my partner’s trail! — before taking a detour up another ridge and ending up at the meadow of purple and yellow and red and orange that my partner and I had stumbled upon one year earlier. Glen stopped often, sharing stories of the plants and this place. He explained the differences between native bunchgrasses and the invasive annuals that are so pervasive here. He showed us the telltale signs of deer grazing on the tender, green stalks. And he told us his story, how he fell in love with this place and how he set about to save it. Glen was passionate and practical, and despite his “I’m-just-a-retired-landscaper” demeanor, he knew as much about people and human systems as he did about plants and the land. He spoke casually about his approach to restoration and to wrangling volunteers, but it was clear how much thought was behind them. For example, they only sought volunteers who were willing to make a weekly commitment. The first six weeks were “training” sessions, and if you made it that far, you would get a cool hat. Volunteer sessions began with a discussion about that day’s tasks as well as what people were seeing and learning. The days ended with snacks, a ritual that Glen clearly treasured. He wasn’t recruiting hands. He was building a community. Similarly, Glen didn’t make a big fuss about his evolving relationship with the municipal district and other agencies, but it was clear that his approach was a huge reason for the project’s success. He not only had positive relationships with the different entities involved, he seemed to be changing them from the outside-in. “Every system wants good energy,” Glen explained. “When you bring good energy, it flows throughout the system, encouraging others to bring their good energy, and it flushes the bad stuff away.” Something shifted inside of me when he spoke those words. We stood at the edge of the bright, colorful meadow, listening to Glen share his small, simple formula as we experienced first-hand what it looked like to heal vast swaths of land, despite the odds. I thought about all of the groups I had been working with, all of the resistance I had been experiencing, all of my failures. I thought about how tired and demoralized I felt by my work and by the previous four pandemic years. I thought about how helpless I felt about what was happening in this country. And yet, when I stood there, when I heard Glen’s stories of how this place became what it was, when I felt his and other people’s good energy, I felt validation and hope. Skyline Gardens came about because he cared about something so much, he decided to do something about it, however small. And small it was. Keeping even a small patch of land clear of weeds is an arduous task, one that most people (myself included) disliked. There was no way Glen could succeed in his task, even if he could recruit an army of volunteers. It was too big, too hard. And yet, Glen has succeeded. He has succeeded by being thoughtful and strategic in how he does the work. He has succeeded by bringing others along with him, investing in community, taking time to get to know and develop the knowledge and leadership of those around him. He has succeeded by balancing rest with relentlessness. He has succeeded by not skipping steps. He has succeeded by bringing good energy. When I got home that evening, my partner asked how the walk went. I told her about the things I experienced, the people I met, the stories Glen told. I told her about what he had said about good energy. Then I started sobbing uncontrollably. Church Many years ago, I was getting to know a new colleague over dinner, and he asked me if I had a spiritual practice. “I play basketball every Sunday morning,” I responded. Last year, after two decades of living in beautiful San Francisco, I moved across the Bay to Oakland. I happened to be nearing my 50th birthday, and I knew that someday soon, my body would force me to find a new “church.” Moving away from my regular game seemed to be a good excuse for me to try something new on my own terms. I had been dreading this moment for years. No other physical activity brought me the same joy as running around the court, trying to make that silly orange ball go through that round metal hoop. Nothing else allowed me to breathe, to let go of whatever was occupying me, to stay in the moment the way basketball did. But for the first time, I felt that maybe there was something that could take its place, something that could serve as a weekly physical, mental, and spiritual reset. One week after my move, I showed up to Skyline Gardens, ready to work. I wasn’t sure at the time if I was in it for the long-haul, but I committed to making it through the six-week training period and getting that coveted hat. Two weeks in, I was sure. Time in nature and gardening have well-documented physical and mental health benefits. I’ve known this for a long time, and I’ve always felt the benefits, but I’ve never been able to make either a habit before Skyline Gardens. The quality of the people who volunteer there is a big reason why. There is also something special about the weekly rhythm. When you literally stick your hands in the dirt week after week, you start to notice the little things. You see plants go through different cycles. You hear the Spotted Towhees clicking and the California Quail warbling. The vast array of insects stop being “bugs” and start becoming green sweat bees and stink beetles and checkerspot caterpillars. You start to understand the eating habits and preferences of bunnies and gophers and deer. Time. Slows. Down. And you slow down with it. Over time, you start to see the impact of your work. You see seeds that you’ve sown start to grow. You see natives that you didn’t plant start to emerge from areas that you’ve weeded. You start to understand why you should ignore the mustard seedlings while relentlessly pulling the six-week fescue, even though the mustard is right there and would only take you a few seconds to remove it. These little wins accumulate over time, and they strengthen your faith and your resilience. And if your faith ever waivers, you just have to remember that gorgeous meadow in the Spring, and you feel the good energy surge within you once again. Faith, it turns out, is also a muscle. I remember why I’m doing my work. I remember what I’m trying to help others do, and how. I remember the importance of vision, but also the dangers of it. I want people to understand that taking time to make small things — however trivial they might seem — builds our muscles, our faith, our resilience. All of these things are what make big visions possible. Thanks to Eun-Joung Lee, H. Jessica Kim, Travis Kriplean, Kate Wing, Doug Obegi, Jenny Lau, Rebecca Petzel, and Renee Fazzari for helping me crystallize these thoughts over many conversations. And many, many thanks to all of the wonderful volunteers at Skyline Gardens, especially Glen Schneider, Cynthia Adkisson, Margaret Flaherty, and Mary Palafox.

Four years ago, I started organizing a small end-of-year gathering with other Bay Area collaboration practitioners to celebrate and make meaning of the year together. We would spend the first few hours of our session mapping how our individual years went using an exercise called Journey Mapping, then we would share our respective stories with each other and toast the end of the year with libations and snacks. It was a lovely ritual, and it became an annual tradition. This past year, we couldn’t do a face-to-face gathering due to the pandemic, so we decided to do it remotely instead. Going remote had three wonderful benefits. We were able to divide it into two sessions, which netted us more time. We were able to invite more people, including folks who lived outside of the Bay Area. And, it was a good kick-in-the-pants for me to write up the exercise so that others could organize their own gatherings. (Several folks did, which made me incredibly happy.) Journey Mapping is a quick way of visually telling the story of a project’s highs and lows over a bounded timeline. (Product managers may be familiar with customer journey mapping, which is similar in spirit, but different in practice.) You can do the exercise on your own, but it’s nicer in a group setting, even when everyone is doing it for themselves (as we do in our end-of-year ritual). It’s like working out with a buddy — you’re more likely to do it if others are doing it with you, and it’s a wonderful way to support each other and build community. When you do it as a group on a shared project, it serves as a fantastic tool for making meaning together and for discussing and developing shared narratives. I often use it as a ritual for teams to celebrate, mourn, learn, and transition. How you do the exercise is not as important as simply making time to reflect regularly. The more you do it, the more you’ll understand how best to adjust it for your specific situation. That said, Journey Mapping has three attributes that I think are particularly powerful. First, it contextualizes your work in your overall life. The toolkit specifically asks you to map highs and lows both professionally (or with a specific project) and personally. In a team setting, the tendency is to skip the personal brainstorming, especially when you have limited time. Sometimes, this is warranted. However, you lose a lot when you do this. Several years ago, I did this exercise with a startup’s leadership team, which was struggling mightily with interpersonal dynamics. Earlier that year, they had been running out of money, and they weren’t sure they would be able to raise another round of investments. Not surprisingly, that was a low point professionally for everyone. At the same time, one of the leaders had also been dealing with a family tragedy and the dissolution of a relationship. The rest of the team never knew about this and only found out about this through the Journey Mapping exercise. Learning about their teammate’s personal struggles many months after the fact caused them to re-examine how they viewed their behavior during that time, leading to greater empathy, a little regret, and ultimately forgiveness. Second, the Journey Mapping exercise asks you to list the highs and lows from memory first, then to review your calendar, journal, and other artifacts and add anything you might have forgotten. This reminds you that what you might be feeling and remembering in the moment is rarely the whole story and that there may be lessons to harvest or things to celebrate that are worth revisiting. It also reminds us of the importance of having and reviewing artifacts. Third, the Journey Mapping exercise encourages you to take your somewhat structured set of sticky notes and create meaningful art out of it. For example, these were the sticky notes that I created for my 2020 (using Sticky Studio): and this was my artistic rendition: This part of the exercise almost always gets short shrift. We often treat art as optional — nice, but not necessary. Doing this end-of-year ritual with my colleagues the past four years has helped me realize that this is a mistake, not just with Journey Mapping, but with many of my exercises. Practically speaking, when you create something that’s beautiful, you’re more likely to look at it again. More importantly, the act of creation leads to an understanding that’s far deeper and more meaningful than a set of sticky notes can convey. You can get a taste of what I mean by looking at the art that some of my colleagues created: Everybody chose to tell their story differently, from emphasizing specific themes (e.g. needing space, “re-“ words) to capturing a larger metaphor (e.g. tree, river). My colleague, Catherine Madden, organized her year into five categories and wove her story into the tapestry on the right — you can read more about her story and process here. Seeing what people created and listening to their stories were incredibly moving. I will remember those stories in a way that I don’t think would have been possible if they had simply told them or shared their sticky notes. Moreover, I don’t know that they would have told the stories the way they did if they had not had the chance to create this art. My 2020 The personal backdrop for my 2020 was — like everyone’s — all about the pandemic. I was incredibly fortunate to be healthy and safe and not to lose anyone to COVID-19. So many people were not that lucky. The numbers are staggering — 2.2 million deaths worldwide so far, 450,000 in the U.S alone. (For comparison, 400,000 Americans died in World War II.) What made it all the more heartbreaking — especially for someone whose purpose is to help society collaborate more effectively — was how divided and misaligned we were in these trying times. I was way luckier than most, but pandemic life was still hard. I spent the spring simply trying to cope. Like many people, one mechanism I tried was growing plants. I found a wilted mint sprig in the back of my refrigerator, which I rooted in water for several weeks, then transferred to a pot. I observed and documented the process every day, occasionally sharing what I saw on Instagram. My partner, amused by the loving care I was showing my plant, named it, “Mo.” I was awed by how resilient my mint was, and I was also surprised how gratifying this simple, regular practice of paying attention to Mo Mint felt. Resilience. Paying attention. These became recurring themes both personally and professionally. I went into 2020 hoping that I could spend 30 percent of my time on coaching and training individual collaboration practitioners. I felt that this would be the best path to maximizing my impact, and it’s also where I felt the most energy and joy. A third of the way into the year, as the lockdowns were starting, it was clear that I wasn’t getting enough traction to hit that number. I also went into 2020 adamant that I would only take on organizational clients willing to try my muscle-building approach to addressing their challenges. Convincing clients to do this has always been difficult, but my yield in the first half of 2020 was even lower than what it usually was. In an interesting twist, both the pandemic and the racial unrest created demand around collaboration practitioners who could help with remote work and equity work. However, most of the prospects who came my way were more interested in quick fixes than the kind of deep work that real change requires. Grappling with those two things in concert was hard enough. Doing so during a pandemic was even harder. Paying attention and focusing on resilience made all the difference in the world. The previous year, I had started to experiment with video as a way to better communicate my frameworks and practices, and I had more ideas and partially written scripts than time to produce them. Several conversations I had been having with colleagues inspired me to revisit one of these videos, Acting Strategically, which I published in April. The response was universally positive, with many people asking me, “What would it look like for me or my organization to do this?” This led me to dust off some workouts I had developed over the years and start piloting them with colleagues and friends. The pilots performed well, and I loved doing them. I started preparing an “official” offering for late 2020, when something unexpected happened. Focusing on strategy was helping prospective organizational clients understand my workout approach in a way that had failed to click otherwise. Even when it was clear that they needed to focus on areas other than strategy, because they were better primed for this approach, they were more open to using workouts to address other aspects of collaboration. By late summer, I found myself doing workouts with several organizational clients. It was gratifying and generative, but it was also taking my energy away from my individual practitioner offerings. I was conflicted, but I ultimately decided to go with where the demand was taking me and to hold off on my individual offerings indefinitely. Looking Forward and Backward and Forward Again Doing the Journey Mapping this past December had one more interesting twist. A few years earlier, Catherine Madden had suggested doing the exercise as a way of looking forward, not just looking back. At the beginning of 2020, I decided to try her suggestion, drawing what I imagined my professional curve might look like at the end of 2020. Here’s what I drew: It was fascinating to compare this with how my year actually went. I had imagined a choppy beginning with a gradual upward trend, and I wasn’t completely wrong. However, the choppiness ended up being twice as long with an overall downward trajectory, there was never any “big” win, and while my year did end on an higher note, it wasn’t as high as I had hoped. Still, as with all scenario work, the goal wasn’t prediction, it was to prepare for possibilities. Because I had imagined that my year would be choppy initially, I was mentally and emotionally prepared when that turned out to be true. I had also adjusted my strategic goals accordingly, so even though they ended up being off, they were not as off as they probably would have been otherwise. Finally, because I had written it all down, I had something to look at and reflect on at the end of the year. I am determined to do this exercise again for 2021, but it’s already February. I’m about two months behind where I usually am in terms of planning, and I find myself more unmoored than I’ve been since starting this Faster Than 20 experiment seven years ago. I’m trying to be compassionate with myself. Last year was not normal, and while there are some positive signs, we’re not out of the woods yet, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty moving forward. I’m still excited about providing workouts, coaching, and community for collaboration practitioners. I have a set of clients I’m currently supporting, I have some ideas of what I want to offer individual practitioners later this year, and I will undoubtedly continue to experiment. Beyond that, I just don’t know. What I do know is that rituals, community, and time to reflect matter. I am always grateful for my peers and our end-of-year gathering, but I feel especially so now. I hope many of you find Journey Mapping valuable as well.

It’s now been seven years since I first started exploring a simple hypothesis: Collaboration is a muscle (or, rather, a set of muscles) You strengthen these muscles by exercising them repeatedly (i.e. practice) Our current orientation toward collaboration is knowledge-centric, not practice-centric. No one expects anyone to get good at playing the guitar by handing them a book or sending them to a week-long “training,” yet somehow, this is exactly how we try to help folks get better at communicating or navigating hairy group dynamics. I’ve spent the past seven years trying to change this. I’m currently on the fifth iteration of my experiments, which I’m currently calling Collaboration Gym. The other iterations (slightly out of order) were: Changemaker Bootcamp (2013) Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets (2014-2015) Habits of High-Performing Groups (2018-present) “Personal” Training for Organizations (2016-present) Collaboration Gym (2020-present) I’ve failed a lot and learned a ton with each iteration, and I thought it would be fun to summarize what I’ve been learning here. I’ve also been having provocative conversations with Sarna Salzman and Freya Bradford about what a Collaboration Gym (or, in their case, a “Systems Change Dojo”) might look like in their community of Traverse City, Michigan. We’ve stayed mostly big picture so far, but recently decided that it was time to get real and specific. With their permission, I’ve decided to do my thinking out loud so as to force me to write down these scattered thoughts and also get some early feedback from a broader set of folks. That means you, dear reader! Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Changemaker Bootcamp (2013) The first iteration of this experiment was Changemaker Bootcamp, a face-to-face workout program that met for two hours every week for six weeks. I designed a series of exercises focused on developing muscles I considered to be critical for effective collaboration, such as listening actively, asking generative questions, navigating power, and having challenging conversations. My participants — all of whom enrolled individually — generally found the exercises valuable and appreciated the practice-orientation. They also got along well with each other and valued the peer feedback. I designed the workouts to feel like physical workouts, only without the sweating and exhaustion. They consisted of warmups followed by intense exercises, with “just enough” explanations for why we were doing what we were doing. Most found the experiential emphasis refreshing. A few found it slightly dissatisfying. Even though they trusted me, they still wanted me to explain the why of each workout in greater detail. These initial pilots helped me test and refine my initial set of workouts, and they also helped build my confidence. However, there were three key flaws. We weren’t repeating any of the exercises. In order to do this, I needed more of my participants’ time and I needed to focus my workouts on just a few core muscles. I needed an assessment. This would help me figure out the muscles on which to focus, and it would also help participants sense their progress. I was having trouble explaining the specific value and impact of this kind of training to people who didn’t already know and trust me. Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets (2014-2015) I tried to address these flaws in my next iteration, Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets. I almost tripled the length of the program from six to 16 weeks to create more space for repetition and habit-building. I created an assessment that folks would take at the beginning and at the end of the program, which helped me focus the workouts and also enabled the group to track their progress. Finally, I made it a cohort training rather than a program for individuals, which also helped with focus. I also shifted the trainings from face-to-face to a remote, decentralized model, where I paired people up and made them responsible for scheduling their workouts on their own. After each workout, folks would share one takeaway on an online forum. This created group accountability by signaling that they were doing the workouts, but it itself was also a workout focused on muscles for sharing early and often. Every four weeks, everyone would get together for a full group workout. Not being face-to-face meant I couldn’t (easily) do somatic workouts and that the instructions had to be clear and compelling. Not leading the pair workouts meant that I couldn’t make real-time adjustments. These constraints forced me to be more rigorous in designing and testing my workouts. In return, doing them remotely made it easier to participate and shifted agency away from me to the participants, which was in line with my desire to de-guru-fy this work. I consistently faced early resistance from folks about the time commitment. I tried to explain that the workouts were in the context of the work that they were already doing, so they weren’t actually doing anything “extra,” but reception to this was mixed. Even though people got the metaphor around practice and working out, they didn’t have their own felt experiences around what this might look like, which made my description of the program feel abstract. In the end, I asked participants to trust me, explaining that they would be believers after a few weeks. Most folks are hungry to talk about their work with someone who will empathize, be supportive, and offer feedback. Talking with the same person regularly enables people to get to the point faster, because their partners already know the context. Even if folks ignored my instructions entirely and just talked, I knew that they would get value out of simply having regular conversations with other good people. This almost always turned out to be true. After the first week of workouts, folks would generally report having an excellent conversation with their partner. After about six weeks, people would often start saying that their workouts with their partners were the highlights of their week. Even though people generally had a felt sense of progress by the end of the program, they especially loved the final assessment, because they could point to and talk about the progress they had made in a concrete way. Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets was a vast improvement over Changemaker Bootcamp, but people were still not practicing enough to see the kinds of dramatic, persistent improvement I wanted to see. I needed to focus the workouts even more and find ways to get people more repetitions. I was also still having trouble explaining how doing these workouts would lead to the promised impacts. People understood the theory, but without felt experience, it felt too abstract. If you think about it, telling folks who are out-of-shape that they could be running a 5K in two months simply by running a little bit every day also feels abstract and far-fetched. The reason people are willing to believe this, even without felt experience, is that they know that many others have done it successfully. I probably need to get to the same place before folks truly believe the story I’m telling about collaboration muscles and practice. Habits of High-Performing Groups (2018-present) In 2018, I decided to shift the frame of my trainings to focus on four habits of high-performing groups: Aligning around success Aligning around working agreements Retrospectives Information hygiene Throughout the course of my work with groups of all shapes and sizes, I noticed that the best-performing groups do all four of these things consistently and well. These also serve as keystone habits, meaning that doing them regularly often unlocks and unleashes other important muscles and habits. Regularly trying to align around anything, for example, forces you to get better at listening, synthesizing, and working more iteratively. Only having four habits made focusing my workouts much easier. My monthly Good Goal-Setting Peer Coaching Workshops was an attempt to help people strengthen their muscles around the first habit — aligning around success. Participants were asked to fill out a Success Spectrum before the workshop, then they got two rounds of feedback from their peers and optional feedback from me afterward. People could register for individual workshops, or they could pay for a yearly subscription that enabled them to drop into any workshop. The subscription was priced low to incentivize regular attendance. Almost 30 percent of registrants opted for the subscription, which was wonderful. However, only 40 percent of subscribers participated in more than one workshop, even though their evaluations were positive, which meant that the majority of subscribers were essentially paying a higher fee for a single workshop. One subscriber didn’t show up to any of the trainings, which made my gym analogy even more apt. Another subscriber attended four trainings, and watching her growth reaffirmed the value of this muscle-building approach. However, not being able to get more folks to attend more regularly — even though they had already paid for it — was a bummer. I think I could leverage some behavioral psychology to encourage more repeat participation. One trick I’m keen to try is to have people pay a subscription fee, then give them money back every time they attend a workout. I also think cohort models, like Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets, are better at incentivizing more regular attendance. The most negative feedback I got from these trainings was that some participants wanted more coaching from me as opposed to their peers. I designed these trainings around peer coaching as part of my ongoing effort to de-guru-fy this work. Just like working out with a buddy can be just as effective for getting into shape as working out with a personal fitness instructor, I wanted people to understand that making time to practice with anyone helps develop collaboration muscles. Still, I think there’s an opportunity to strike a better balance between peer feedback and feedback from me. In this vein, this past year, I started offering Coaching for Collaboration Practitioners as a way to help leaders and groups develop the four habits of high-performing groups. This has been my most effective muscle-building approach to date, which makes me somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, I’m glad that acting as a personal trainer is effective at getting people to work out. On the other hand, not everyone can afford a personal trainer. We need more gym-like practice spaces if we’re going to help folks at scale. “Personal” Training for Organizations (2016-present) Finally, over the past five years, I’ve been experimenting with customized organizational workouts focused on specific needs, such as strategy and equity. I’ve found decent success at convincing potential clients to let me take a muscle-building approach toward their work. For example, rather than help a client develop a strategy, I will lead a client through a series of workouts designed to strengthen their muscles for acting strategically. Still, I often have to strike a tricky balance between more traditional consulting and this workout approach. I’ve gotten much better at striking this balance over the years. In the early days, I tried partnering with other consultants to handle the more traditional work so that I could focus on the training. That almost always failed, especially with more established partners, because they didn’t fully get and believe in my approach, and in the struggle to find the right balance, the workouts would usually fall by the wayside. Working by myself allowed me to be more disciplined in my approach, but I still struggled to maintain the right balance, and I failed a lot. I feel like I’ve only begun to turn the corner in the past few months. One thing that’s helped is getting much clearer about what clients need to already have in place in order for the muscle-building approach to succeed, specifically: Alignment around the what, why, and how Structures, mindsets, and muscles to support their work For example, attempting to help a group develop muscles when they don’t have the right structures in place can cause more harm than good. To help demonstrate what happens when you’re missing one of these critical ingredients, I created a model inspired by the Lippitt-Knoster Model, to which Kate Wing introduced me: Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Performance Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Confusion “Why are we doing this?!” Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Frustration “We can’t succeed in these conditions.” Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Resistance “I don’t want to be doing this.” Alignment Structures Mindsets Muscles = Anxiety “We’re not capable of doing this.” Collaboration Gym and Future Iterations I’m mostly resigned to more “personal training” work, if only to accumulate more Couch-to-5K-style success stories, so that people can develop more faith in the muscle-building approach. (If you or your organization would like to hire me for coaching or to design a custom workout program, drop me an email.) But I continue to be committed to experimenting with more scaleable and affordable approaches to muscle-building than hiring personal trainers. I’m hoping to unveil the Collaboration Gym early next year, and I’ve already successfully piloted a number of new workouts that will be part of it. Epic success for me is to see others participate in similar experiments on their own and to share what they learn. A Collaboration Gym is only useful if there are lots of gyms all over the place. I give away all of my intellectual property so that others can copy and build on it, and I will continue to share my learnings here to further encourage replication.

When I was in my early 20s, I used to play pickup basketball with a guy who was 20 years older than me, but didn’t look it. He was in superb shape, and he never seemed to get injured. At one of our games, I sprained my ankle, and when I was healthy enough to return, I asked him if he had any rehab tips. "Yoga," he replied. He hadn't sprained his ankle in over ten years, which he attributed to his yoga practice. I was intrigued, but never seemed to get around to trying it. It took me another ten years before I took my first yoga class. It was hard, it felt great, and I could see the value of making it a regular practice. But I never did, and I was totally okay with that. Now I’m in my mid-40s. My partner is an avid yoga practitioner, so I’ve been doing it more often too — at least once a month. As someone who likes to push myself, I used to chuckle when my instructors would encourage us to do the opposite, to appreciate where we were and to celebrate that we were doing something rather than strain to do more and possibly hurt ourselves along the way. It was the opposite of how I was used to doing things, but I ended up embracing this kinder, gentler mentality. Frankly, if this weren’t the culture, I would probably never do yoga at all. Which is the point! Here’s the thing. The last few years, I’ve done yoga more than I ever have, but I’m not noticeably stronger or more flexible. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m less flexible. The yoga has almost certainly slowed my deterioration, and it’s undoubtedly had other positive effects as well. However, if I want to counter or even surpass the impact of age and lifestyle, once a month clearly won’t cut it. High-performance is a choice. It’s okay not to make that choice (as I have with yoga and my overall flexibility), but it’s helpful to be honest with yourself about it. If you’re the leader of a group, it’s not just helpful, it’s critical, because saying one thing and behaving differently can end up harming others, even if your original intentions were sincere. I have seen this play out with groups my entire career, and I’m seeing it play out again in this current moment as groups struggle with their desire to address their internal challenges around racial and gender equity. The root of the problem is lack of clarity and alignment around what success looks like. A good indicator of this is when leaders say their groups should be doing “more,” without ever specifying how much. What do you actually mean by “more”? If you have a yoga view of the world, then “more” might imply that whatever you end up doing is fine, but not necessary. You’re not holding your group or yourself accountable to the results. If this is indeed what you mean, then it’s better to make this clear. (With the Goals + Success Spectrum, you can do this by putting it in the Epic column.) If this isn’t what you mean, then you run the risk of doing harm. People project what “more” means to them, which leads to contradictory expectations, working at cross-purposes, and toxicity. Worse, people’s definitions can shift over time. When this happens, the person with the most power gets to decide whether or not the group is succeeding or failing, and ends up doling out the consequences accordingly. A team can’t perform if the target is obscure and constantly moving. Furthermore, if someone is already being marginalized in a group, a system like this is only going to further marginalize them. It’s also natural to question a group or leader’s sincerity when they aren’t holding themselves accountable to clear goals. Instead of saying “more,” groups and leaders should practice asking, “how much?” How much more revenue are you trying to make? How much more equitable are you trying to be? How much more collaborative are you trying to be? What exactly does success look like to you? Most importantly, why? Why is it important to make this much more revenue, or to get this much more equitable or collaborative? Your answers to these questions will help you understand whether or not your strategies and even your goal make sense. If your goal is to stay in shape, then running a few miles a week might be enough. If your goal is to run a marathon, then running a few miles a week isn’t going to get you there. If you don’t want to run more, maybe it’s better to prioritize staying in shape over running a marathon. One of my favorite tools to use with groups is the Behavior Over Time graph. Once a group has articulated what “how much” success looks like, I ask them to draw a graph, where the X-axis is time and the Y-axis is the success indicator you’re tracking. I then ask them to put the current date in the middle of the X-axis and to graph their historical progress. Finally, I ask them to graph their best case scenario for what the future might look like if they continue doing what they’re doing. For example, if my goal is to run a marathon by November, but I’m only running a few miles a week, my Behavior Over Time graph might look like this: The gap between the best case scenario and where I want to be is a signal that I either need to do something differently or change my goal. However, someone else might have a different hypothesis for what the best case scenario is: The goal of all this is not to rigidly quantify everything, nor is it to analyze your way to a “definitive” answer. The goal is to make your mental models and theories of change explicit, so that you and others can talk about them, align around them, test them, and either hold yourself accountable or openly and collectively adjust your goals as you learn. Getting concrete about “how much” is a lot harder than simply saying, “more.” You might think you can do everyone a favor by keeping things ambiguous, but what you’d actually be doing is exacerbating toxic power dynamics, where everyone is left guessing what the goal actually is and starts operating accordingly. The way around this is to do the hard work while applying the yoga principle of self-compassion. When you don’t achieve a goal, I think most of our defaults is to be hard on ourselves. The challenge and the opportunity is to re-frame success so that it’s not just about the goal, but about both the goal and the process. If you’re doing anything hard or uncertain, failure is inevitable. What matters is that you fail enough so that you have the opportunity to find success. Holding ourselves accountable to goals is important, but celebrating our hard work and stumbles along the way is equally so. Photo by Eun-Joung Lee.

It’s been one month since a white police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, a 46-year old Black father of five. I’ve found the subsequent response remarkable for its intensity, unprecedented diversity, and impact. While I’m moved by how many people and organizations seem genuinely compelled to act, I’m also vexed by some of the rhetoric around what “doing something” actually means. Woke theatre aside, I get that it’s hard to know what to do or how. I can see how easy it is to be overwhelmed by the enormity of wanting to eradicate 400 years of structural and cultural racism or by the fear of doing or saying the “wrong” thing. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there, and folks have been circulating them with abandon. While many resonate with both my personal and professional experience, I’ve found several to be questionable or worse, and I can’t help feeling like most of this resource sharing misses the point. You can’t just work your way through a listicle and solve racism. This work is hard, but maybe not in the way most of us think it is. The muscles required to create a more equitable society are the same ones needed to be skilled collaboration practitioners, and they can only be developed through practice and repetition. The key is to focus on the right things and to do them over and over again. The devil, of course, is in the details, and I want to riff on those here. But first, I want to tell two stories. The first is about data, narratives, and human psychology. According to the Mapping Police Violence database, 91 people have been killed by police in the 38 days since George Floyd’s murder. Nineteen of them (21 percent) were Black, a slight decrease from the overall percentage over the past eight years (25 percent). Thirty-two of the 91 killed were white. I read all of the news items documenting each of these 51 killings (not counting the 40 victims of other or unreported race). The vast majority of the victims were armed. Many were violent criminals — rapists, murderers. Several of the deaths were the result of shootouts, and some cops died as a result. A few cases of both Black and white victims raised my eyebrows, but there was nothing that felt as clearly wrong and overtly racist as George Floyd’s murder. Reading about these 51 deaths left me feeling depressed, but not outraged. As I dove more deeply into these incidents, I couldn’t help wondering how I would have felt about racialized police violence if I had not been exposed to countless stories like George Floyd’s over the years, if my only exposure to police violence were accounts like the 51 articles I read. It was a troubling thought, because of all the numbers that I mentioned and stories that I shared, there’s only one that really matters: that 25 percent of people killed by police are Black. Why does that number matter? Because only 14 percent of Americans are Black, which means that Black people are disproportionately killed by police by a big margin. Even if George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Philando Castile or any of the many Black women and men who were definitively unjustly killed by police over the years had never happened, that 25 percent number would still be a clear indication of a racial disparity that needs to be addressed. Therein lies the essential challenge. No one has ever looked at a number and taken to the streets. There are lots of mental hoops required to make sense of that number, to trust its implications, and then to get outraged by it. We’re seeing this play out right now with the massive racial disparity of COVID-19 deaths, which is killing far more Black and Latinx people than police violence, yet hasn’t resulted in large-scale public outrage. In a perfect world, it shouldn’t take a shocking video of a Black man being callously suffocated to death by a smug white police officer for folks to recognize that the system is racist, but for most of us, that’s exactly what it took. Except that’s not quite the whole story either. As visceral as George Floyd’s death was, it still wouldn’t have had the impact that it did without the massive amount of work and resources that the Movement for Black Lives has invested in organizing, mobilizing, and collectively aligning around a policy platform over the past eight years. Contrary to how it may appear on the surface, the Movement for Black Lives isn’t just a hashtag. It’s also not a single organization with a clear hierarchy of decision-making and leadership. It’s a network full of leaders, organizations, and activists, some more visible than others, but every one of them playing a critical role. That makes it harder to understand, talk about, or fund. Human beings love simple, emotional narratives. We need to accept this about ourselves and leverage it to motivate change. But once we allow ourselves to be moved, we also have to be willing to let go of these simple, emotional narratives and dive more deeply into the messy and far less compelling nuts and bolts of the work. Real change takes lots of hard work, the kind that most people are completely uninterested in hearing about or doing. The second story I want to tell is about basketball. When your team has the ball and is trying to score, one of the easiest ways to help your teammates is to set a screen. This consists of positioning your body so that it serves as a kind of wall that prevents the defender from chasing your teammate. If the defender sees it coming, they can try to dance around the screen, but that split second of separation is often enough to give your teammate an advantage. If the defender doesn’t see it coming, then it results in a collision, which usually hurts them a lot more than it hurts you. If you’re defending, and you see the other team set a screen, all you have to do is yell, “Left!” or “Right!” depending on where the screen is relative to your teammate. At best, your teammates can adjust and eliminate the offensive advantage. At worst, you save a teammate from a painful collision. It is a simple and effective intervention that doesn’t require any special athletic abilities. All it takes is attention and communication. Still, it’s not intuitive. Many players — even experienced ones — have to be told to “call out the screens,” often by a frustrated teammate who has just been flattened by one. I find this fascinating. Basketball is a hard sport to learn and play. I’ve played it my whole life, and I’m still mediocre at the shooting and dribbling part, which require physical acumen. But I’m great at calling out screens, which simply requires me to talk. Why is it so hard for others? Why isn’t this the first thing that people learn how to do? It turns out that being an ally is a muscle, and that developing that muscle takes practice. A few weeks ago, I was on a check-in call for a network of Black activists and allies. On the first part of the call, folks shared a number of inspiring stories about some of the amazing work happening on the ground in Minneapolis and other places around the U.S. Themes around being invisible and the importance of reclaiming one’s own agency and not replicating existing power dynamics came up over and over again. Afterward, we broke out into small discussion groups. I was in a group with four other people, including a moderator. None of us knew each other, so the moderator called on people, one-by-one, to introduce themselves, and he inadvertently skipped me. I waited several moments for someone — anyone — to point this out, but nobody did, and the group started diving into the discussion. I finally found a point to jump in, saying with a smile, “I have a thought, and while I’m at it, I’ll also introduce myself.” The moderator profusely apologized, not just in the moment, but throughout the rest of the discussion. I was touched by how badly he clearly felt. It was fine, I knew it wasn’t intentional, and I would have been okay regardless. And everyone in the group was lovely. What really stuck out for me, though, was how no one else in the group noticed or said anything, especially after all of the talk beforehand about the importance of seeing each other, of being seen, and of being good allies. I’ll say it again: This work is hard, but maybe not in the way most of us think it is. The muscles required to create a more equitable society are the same ones needed to be skilled collaboration practitioners, and they can only be developed through practice and repetition. The key is to focus on the right things and to do them over and over again. I’ve worked with all kinds of groups over the years, including many social justice groups, and I’m constantly struck by how bad most of us are at the fundamentals. It’s why I’ve moved away from larger systems change projects and have focused my energies on training and coaching. If you’re trying to create a more equitable world, but you can’t even run an equitable meeting, much less an equitable organization, you’re focused on the wrong problem. Everything is connected. If we just stepped back and started with smaller, simpler (but by no means simple) challenges, giving ourselves plenty of permission to make mistakes along the way, we would be far more likely to make headway with the bigger, harder societal problems that so many of us care so much about. Which brings me to the thing I really want to say to collaboration practitioners and organizations who want to contribute to a more racially just world. Urgency is the enemy of equity. If you really want to make a difference, start by slowing down. All of the racial equity training in the world won’t make a lick of difference if you don’t have the mechanisms and the right mindsets in place to get clear and aligned about success, to adjust based on what you’re learning, and to hold yourselves accountable to your stated values. In many ways, these are the easiest things to implement, and yet they’re the things groups are most likely to skip. I can’t tell you how many groups have approached me over the years wanting to change their culture somehow, someway, and yet weren’t willing to schedule regular time to assess how they were doing. Frankly, most practitioners I know skip these steps too, and our impact suffers as a result. We get away with it, because no one holds us accountable to long-term success, and the status quo continues merrily on its way. Earlier this year, I wrote about my six-year journey to learn how to slow down. I know how hard it is to change these habits, and I don’t want to suggest that what I did will work for everyone. All I know is that it matters, that it’s an affliction that infects many of us, and that you’re more likely to propagate than address inequity if you don’t figure out how to fix this. It won’t be worthy of a press release, but it’s more likely to result in the impact you want to have in the long run. Moreover, if enough of us do this, the right things will start to happen in society at large. Update: I clarified the number of victims since George Floyd’s death (91) above, explaining that I focused on the Black and white victims (19 and 32 respectively, for a total of 51). Thanks to Travis Kriplean for the suggestion. Illustration from Black Illustrations: The Movement Pack.

Over the past two years, I helped designed and facilitate two annual board retreats for a small nonprofit with my colleague, Zoe Tamaki. I don’t typically do one-offs like this, but the executive director was a friend of mine, and I was looking for an excuse to work with and learn from Zoe. After last year’s retreat, Zoe and I sat down in front of a camera and discussed some things we learned from the experience and from each other, including: The importance of designing with your stakeholders When relationship-building trumps task work How I handled a funky facilitation moment I’d like to share stories like this more frequently, and I hope to explore other mediums in which to do this, especially video. I want to share a lot more about design, which contributes much more to the success of group process than facilitation. I especially want to talk about the harder stuff — the challenging moments or the stuff that flat out fails. Since my focus over the past few years has shifted to supporting and coaching other collaboration practitioners such as Zoe, I’m especially excited to be sharing things I’m learning from them. Finally, I hope to inspire other practitioners to share stories from their work more frequently and without concern about polish. This work is hard. It’s better to show all the rough edges. Many thanks to Zoe for doing this work with me and for being willing to candidly debrief it on camera afterward! As I think you’ll be able to tell from the video, it was super fun working with her.

A huge part of my job over the years has been helping groups recover from Process Trauma (and its ugly cousin Consultant Trauma). It’s caused when a group goes through some kind of process, such as strategic planning, and has a horrible experience. It almost always results in the group deciding never to pursue that process again unless they’re forced to, which exacerbates the trauma. As empathetic as I am to Process Trauma, I am troubled that groups tend to give up on process rather than making adjustments and trying again. If I have a bad experience with a personal fitness trainer, I’m not going to give up on exercise as a path to getting healthier. Why do we do this with our work? I think it’s because people often don’t understand why they’re going through a process in the first place. Instead of pressing for clarity, most folks accept it without questioning it. It’s the organizational version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. People assume that others must know better, or they’re intimidated by the terminology, and they give in. Strategy work is rife with Process Trauma. However, strategy work matters because acting strategically matters. It’s the difference between systematically working toward your higher purpose and flailing in the weeds, trying to put out fires wherever you see them. It’s the difference between flowing in alignment with others and moving at cross-purposes. It’s the difference between success and failure. I recently put together a short video where I explain what strategy is, how to develop good strategy, and how to build strong strategic muscles: I hope this video helps people recover from Process Trauma while also clarifying why and how to do this work. I want to empower folks to speak up when the Emperor has no clothes. I want people to understand that skilled practitioners aren’t good at coming up with answers, but at helping the group ask and explore the right questions. I want people to understand that all good strategy is collective and emergent. I also hope this video helps folks understand why tools like the Strategy / Culture Bicycle are designed the way they are and imagine alternative ways of using them. There’s no one right way to develop good strategy. It’s critical that groups approach it as something they need to figure out for themselves, which takes time and practice. I would love to start a larger conversation about how to align around good strategy. Many strategy consultants are not intentional about helping groups align, which is why their processes often fail. However, collaboration practitioners who are intentional about alignment often stop there rather than making sure that what they align around is good. I touch on some of this in the video, but the devil is always in the details. What strikes me about Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is that the emperor keeps walking, naked as the day he was born, head held high, even after the crowd starts hooting at him. Strategy is hard. If you’re not struggling at it, you’re probably not doing it right. But stubbornly marching ahead, ignoring the people around you, guarantees Process Trauma and failure. Good things happen when people know the purpose of a process, make adjustments when they struggle, and practice, practice, practice. Thanks to H. Jessica Kim for reviewing an early draft of this post. Photo by Png Nexus, CC BY NC-ND 2.0.