Positive Structures

Why does this structure build community?

Last week I heard two examples of very similar structures that seem to generate a high degree of

interpersonal involvement among participants. In each case, participants get together to get help on something they are doing and to help their colleagues. There's much more helping of others than getting helped (directly) and the results make people feel quite connected. I'll describe each and then note the common themes. And maybe you can suggest more examples or why these seem to work so well.

Action learning

The first example was "action learning". In action learning, people are put together in groups that have issues that they are (usually individually) addressing. When the group meets, perhaps 1/2 to 1 day per month, each member in turn talks about the problem they are addressing. The process, as described by one action learning firm is:

1. Describing the problem as we see it
2. Receiving contributions from others in the form of questions
3. Reflecting on our discussion and deciding what action to take
4. Reporting back on what happened when we took action
5. Reflecting on the problem-solving process and how well it is working

People work together as peers helping each other. not based on specialized knowledge but mostly based on asking questions and holding each other accountable for taking action.

The founder of action learning, Reginald Revans, was apparently opposed to having facilitators, although some practitioners who use active learning approaches do recommend facilitators to improve impact.

TEC/Vistage Group

The second example was TEC (The Executive Committee) groups.

These groups (now known in the US as Vistage) are ongoing, facilitated peer groups of business owners. As I understand it, they meet for one day monthly, and membership also includes a monthly 2 hour coaching session with the chairperson.  You have to apply and pay to be a member, and it isn't cheap. Here's part of a description from a facilitator's website. 

Business leaders from non-competing industries meet on a monthly basis to form meaningful relationships and share their knowledge and experiences to help and challenge one another to come up with better solutions for their businesses.

At the meetings, members discuss the pressing issues in their business. Again, most of the time is focused on other people, but each member does get attention. Holding people accountable for what they said they were going to do seems to be an important element.The result can be a very close community of people who welcome and support each other.

A key insight might be that this is not for everyone. The Vistage facilitator quoted above also says that of the people who contact him who have the right positions to be members, only 2 of out 10 become members. Many do not have the attitude and approach that would make them a good member.

What are the common themes?

The common themes seem to be:

1. Small group of people
2. Regular meetings
3. Ground rules
4. You get some attention for your own problem, but it outweighed by the attention you give to others
5. Focus on accountability to each other for results on your individual project ( i.e., I, a member, hold you accountable for what you said you wanted to achieve) as well as on information exchange

Questions for you

What experience do you have in groups like this?  Do you know other examples?  If your experience was good, what caused it to be good?

 

A new path to a new dawn for science (and scientists)

My work on collaboration has been greatly influenced by the Polymath project in 2009.  In the first Polymath project (there have been more since) mathematician Tim Gowers asked if there was a way for mathematicians to do research together.  He proposed on his blog to test the idea by trying to shed some light on a problem (called "DHJ" for short) he was working on. He outlined a few extremely sensible rules for how to work together, and invited contributions. The result was a major success, opening some new mathematical pathways and leading to a paper published in a very prestigious math journal under the name of D.H.J. Polymath. 

Michael Nielsen on Reinventing Discovery

One of the players in the Polymath story was physicist and science writer Michael Nielsen. In Nielsen's book from 2012 called Reinventing Discovery - The New Era of Networked Science, he takes a thoughtful, wide-ranging and very well written view of the field of collaborative science. The opportunities and problems he sees, and what he fails to discuss, suggest some wonderful opportunities for the core concepts behind Collaborating Minds.  

Nielsen looks at science and sees that the Internet has made new kinds of shared work possible. He discusses approaches that:

• Enable scientists to contribute their special knowledge to people who need it but who don't know them (an example is the Innocentive site and process). 
• Let researchers build on the ideas of others (examples include Polymath, the Kasparov vs. the world chess game, and the MathWorks programming contests).
• Facilitate involvement by the general public using its pattern recognition skills (including Fold-It protein folding, Galaxy Zoo galaxy categorization)
• Use new tools and algorithms to draw conclusions from massive amounts of data (using an example of deducing new insight from statistical analysis of Medline data without doing new experiments, and also the Sloan Sky Survey)

The barriers Nielsen sees to more collaborative work of all these kinds are the culture of science and the incentives scientists have. Scientists get rewarded by publishing papers, and believe that protecting their data is necessary to prevent theft of their ideas. Except in extraordinary circumstances when driven by funding agencies, they generally don't share. Nor do they get credit for helping others, or for contributing to joint projects. Or for inventing tools that others can use or generating data that are helpful to others. We cannot do the best science because our culture won't let us.

The Culture of Science is Stifling

At the same time, the same culture of science is a disaster for people in science. Booms and busts in funding lead to armies of highly trained specialists all competing for a very limited number of grants and positions. As a result, many scientists cannot balance science and the rest of life, e.g., family. People are driven to pursue "safe" work rather than pursuing breakthrough ideas with a higher risk of failure (or of learning!). The same culture that leads science to not be able to capitalize on new collaborative approaches also leads many people to have miserable lives. Not a good thing at all.

The rabbit out of the hat - an intentional community of the heart and the mind

A potential solution is the creation of a community of people who want to make an investment in pursuing collaboration as a better route to both personal fulfillment and scientific progress.  Many scientists face an extremely low probability of conventional success, so pursuing a new approach might not really be costly (just courageous).  Imagine an intentional community of the heart and of the mind -- scientists who have decided to throw in their lot with others who are also committed to the success and development of their colleagues and collaborators, and who have committed to rise and fall with the others.  A minority of people from each institution has this orientation and these people affiliate with each other around a set of tools and principles for interacting and for sharing and for sharing credit (I had biology on my mind with the highly illustrative picture below). They remain at the home institutions but also have another basis of support -- one that really provides support.  In this community, they have a culture that actually supports the kind of collaboration science can now use to advance.

Does somebody want to pay for this?

Maybe somebody would be willing to pay for it. The somebody would be somebody with a commitment to finding new ways of doing science that are more effective.  I wrote a few months ago about Janelia Farm, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They invested in a new idea there. They pay the salaries of talented researchers around the country. Perhaps they or someone like them would be interested.

Let us know what you think about these ideas.

 

 

Paradises built in hell

I have been thinking a great deal about a book I recently read, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit.

It highlights the mutual aid communities that often spring up in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. While it is hard to think of a disaster as a positive structure, the book makes clear that something positive (and perhaps amazingly positive) can spring from such challenging roots. Examples assessed include the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, 9/11 in NYC, an explosion of an ammunition freighter during World War I in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Hurricane Katrina and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985.

What happens in the immediate aftermath of a disaster?

In the moments just after a disaster, the people on the scene already (aka the survivors) are the true "first responders". Indeed, at the World Trade Center, firefighters heading up the stairs encountered people coming down the stairs carrying others in wheelchairs.  In San Francisco in 1906, with the city government and systems not functioning at all in the aftermath, people hauled cooking equipment out into the street to cook food for their neighbors, and indeed for anyone passing by who was in need. Communities of "mutual aid" sprung up where people helped other people, and there was, in the remembrance of participants, a surprisingly high and palpable level of joy amidst the difficulties. 

People in the immediate vicinity do what needs to be done.  Lower Manhattan was evacuated after 9/11. The water borne part of the evacuation (of about 500,000 people) was improvised spontaneously by people who used their boats to move people out of Manhattan.  In earthquakes, survivors begin digging immediately.  

What's going on?

In Solnit's view, the disaster removes the normal structures of society that usually guide people. The key institutions aren't functioning, and people feel free to improvise. They also feel a huge desire to give; for example after 9/11 bloodbanks all over the country were overflowing with people who wanted to do what they thought they could do to help.  People on the scene give by doing what needs to be done. This spirit of giving continues until the authorities respond by sending in a bureaucratic organization (be it the army, the National Guard, or the Red Cross) to "organize" the response.  The arrival of the professionals restore "order" (even if there was no disorder) and removes the apparent need for mutual support, destroying the temporary paradise that had been created of people giving and sharing.  (Solnit also has a lot to say about the fears and responses of the local and national elites about people running their own lives, which she calls "elite panic".)

(Not) mesmerized by what we have to do

Solnit notes that in New York City in thedays just post-9/11, when lower Manhattan wasclosed and transportation was limited, but the rest of the city was physically largely unaffected, people were on the streets but didn't have any goal or task to do. As a result, people could come out and talk, come out and share. The removal of the daily tasks of life made people see the mutual, human world that was available under the surface of the never-ending treadmill of a world they usually feel they inhabit. People could just be with each other, without having some particular end in mind, and that felt very special and very good.

The lasting impact -- the example of Dorothy Day

I was also impressed with the story Solnit related about Dorothy Day, who founded The Catholic Worker newspaper and organization. Day was 8 years old and lived in Oakland during the San Francisco earthquake. The generosity of the people of Oakland to the survivors who came to sleep in Oakland's parks was an inspiration for Day throughout her life; she strove to recreate the spirit of those days just after the disaster.  It was her experience as a child of the post-earthquake community that led her to a life devoted to creating a space where people could enact the goodness she saw they had in them.

So what?

Self-organizing, mutually assisting communities that bring so much joy should not depend on an earthquake or a hurricane or an explosion to happen.  People are good at improvising and they like to help each other.  I'd like to think about more ways to let this happen; we need to figure out how to get out of the way and let it happen.  Have any ideas?

An experiment in scientific research design - Janelia Farm

Have you heard of Janelia Farm?  It's a scientific research facility funded as an experiment by the Howard Hughes Medical Insitute (HHMI) near Washington DC that opened in 2006. There are about 500 scientists working there, under conditions designed to enable them to create breakthroughs. It's a very conscious organizational design, with some features that I find quite interesting. 

The idea was to consciously recreate the atmosphere of Bell Labs in its heyday and of the Cambridge Laboratory for Molecular Biology. It turns out that these two instituions had a few characteristics in common that HHMI thought might be what made them so effective. Some of these were:

1. Fully funded -- no need for scientists to chase grants
2. No responsibilities besides research -- no teaching load, no administration
3. All scientists have to be hands-on -- at the bench
4. A focus on a fairly narrow set of difficult, high-payoff research challenges
5. No tenure -- senior scientists have a five year term and then may or may not be re-signed
6. (My favorite) Research groups can have no more than 6 members. This means that they cannot possibly have all the skills they need inside their team and so will have to get out of their own lab and get to know the other people in the place so they can get the help they need.

All of this is nestled in a facility with amenities intended to increase mingling, interaction and ultimately collaboration.

Is it working?  An article a few years ago said "it's too soon to tell" but some initial signs are good.

Reading about Janelia made me think about how small adjustments (like keeping the groups small) can make a big difference performance. And they may not be the adjustments one thinks of first. Systems are very tricky and getting them to evolve in healthy ways is also tricky. 

 

 

 

Talking with each other -- a positive structure

HBR has published an article which you can (at least right now) view for free here. In it, the author discusses how he measured communication (at the micro-level) among members of various teams, and discovered(??!!) that the social side of team life is critical. One big suggestion - have "team members" have their coffee breaks at the same time and performance improves -- because they talk with each other.

I've been following the work of author Sandy Pentland of MIT for a while, and I find it a little spooky to snoop on people (albeit unobtrusively) only to discover what people who watch people carefully probably already knew. But data makes it real for some people, including as Pentland points out, people who are on teams and who can improve how they relate to each other if they can see it visualized in front of them. It's a very interesting read.

"We proved we could do it, now we can think about how we want to do it"

This story, which I just re-uncovered, is a great example of the problem-solving mindset that doesn't settle for a first answer (see the Barometer Story for another). It's from the book Managing as Designing by Richard Boland Jr., and Fred Collopy. They are talking about the construction of a building on Stanford's campus.

Toward the end of the design process for the Lewis Building, there was a need to reduce the floor space by about 4,500 square feet. One of us traveled to Gehry's Santa Monica offices and worked with the project architect, Matt Fineout, on the problem. We first identified those miscellaneous spaces that had to be squeezed into the smaller footprint (tea kitchens, closets, rest rooms, storage areas, and spaces for copiers, fax machines, and printers). There were many constraints to be met including proximity to classrooms and offices, "ownership" by various departments and research centers, and circulation patterns in each area. We went through the floor plans, beginning with the lower level and working our way up to the fifth floor. The process took two days.

Working with large sheets of onionskin paper laid on top of floor plans, we would sketch possible arrangements until we had something we all agreed was a good solution. Then we would transfer the arrangement in red pencil onto the plans. Each move of one element affected others and often required backtracking and revising previously located elements. Many times during the two days, we would reach a roadblock where things were just not working out, so we would start with a clean sheet of onionskin and try a different approach. At the end of two days, it was a tremendous sense of accomplishment to have succeeded in locating all the required elements into the reduced floor sizes. We were working at a large table and Matt was leaning far onto it, marking the final changes. As he pushed back from the table, we were joking about how tedious the process had been and how glad we were to have it over. As we joked, Matt gathered all the sheets of onionskin and the marked-up floor plans, stacked them, and then grabbed an edge and tore them in half. Then he crumpled the pieces and threw them in the trashcan in the corner of the room. This was a shock! What was he doing? In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, "We proved we could do it, now we can think about how we want to do it."

What an outstanding frame of mind -- to realize that the first solution that gets you over the finish line isn't necessary the best solution. So often, it's answer 3, 4, or 10 that does the trick. When you have multiple options, you are able to choose among them.  It gives you much more confidence in the quality of the answer.

 

A very simple and wonderful positive structure (and another candidate)

This poster apparently was posted all over New York City in 2009. It encouraged people to talk with strangers. How about sticking it up a bunch of these at your next large meeting. I found it via Benjamin Aaron Degenhart and the work was actually developed by Ryan V. Brennan.

In a similar vein, I just joined an website called Letslunch . It matches people within close range of each other who don't know each other but have some common interests and simplifies the process of them meeting for lunch. A clever idea - and we'll see how it works.

 

A great post (not mine) about networks

I don't know what the protocol is with blogs for just lifting something wonderful and reproducing it (with only one comment of my own at the end), but I'll push on. This is a wonderful post from Jack Ricchiuto on a blog he contributes to called Network Weaving.  I just liked it so much because it talks about what is important in a network.

9 Indicators of Growing Networks

We continue to have countless conversations with funders and others who want to "grow" networks of collaborations and innovations. This is impossible until they have enough network literacy to understand what it means that a "network" actually "grows."


Here are 9 simple indicators of network growth, to this purpose. They become both indicators and strategies for the intentional growth of existing networks.

1. People in the network gain broader and deeper awareness of the available assets in the network
2. People in the network gain broader and deeper awareness of potential new collaborators and co-conspirators in the network
3. People in the network spend more time introducing people to one another who are 2+ steps away from each other in the network
4. People in the network spend more time introducing themselves to others who are 2+ steps away from them in the network
5. People in the network discover more new opportunities to engage and combine their assets to create a future different from the past
6. People in the network have more conversations together about their dreams and assets than their problems and deficiencies
7. People in the network value change and differences as more valuable to the network's growth than similarities and protecting a status quo
8. People in the network become "network weavers" who intentionally commit time and imagination to looking for new ways to connect unconnected people in the network
9. People in the network together become more self-organizing, innovative, agile, inclusive, strengths-based, and dedicated to shared thrivancy

Wow. My only addition would be a statement that talks about how people in the network increasingly learn about and help each other reach their dreams because the willingness to know and help each other is a glue that holds a network together -- it's a source of deep value for network members that is often easy to create if you remember to try.

You can read Jack Ricchiuto's original post here.

 

 

Collaborating Minds

For the past few months, my colleague Jim McGee and I have been hard at work on a project we've named Collaborating Minds. It will be an online problem-solving community -- with a unique membership recruiting strategy. The goal is to create a resource that will be able to assist organizations with hard problems by providing rich insights and multiple perspectives. It's a marriage of some of the ideas of crowdsourcing with the principles that make for high performance teams. It's an example of getting more people to work together better, a topic I wrote about a while back.

Collaborating Minds' main assets will be:

1. Its network of 500-700 part-time participants
2. Its approach to community building and structured problem solving,and
3. Its software platform that supports and enables the community building and structured problem-solving. 

The people will be recruited and selected based on their interest and ability to work together in the community in just the way the software platform allows. They will include people from a very diverse set of backgrounds. We'll have scientists of various stripes, engineers of various types, humanists, consultants, experts in all kinds of fields. So in that respect it will be like crowdsourcing.

The community and the problem-solving will be actively managed, and the members will be expected to get to know at least some of the other community members outside the context of the specific problems we are working on. Community members will help each other on their own issues and challenges, and can use the problem-solving tools provided to do so if they like.

The software platform includes a social network of a particular kind, and a structured problem-solving process and spaces for the problem-solving to occur. The problem-solving method will combine structured asynchronous elements and structured synchronous elements (online meetings). We also will have an alternative free-form option for members to use when the structure isn't right for the problem at hand.

There's a lot more info available now at the Collaborating Minds site. We are almost finished with the alpha version of the software platform and are starting to talk with people about recruiting and membership. We have a lot of unanswered questions (e.g., precise target markets, compensation, and governance) and probably some wrong answers to others. One of the best things about this idea though, is that we can aim our group at ourselves; if this sort of group can generate insightful and powerful solutions to hard problems (which I believe it can) then it help us solve the issues that remain ahead.

Improving Virtual Collaboration - Managing the Motivations

On Saturday, May 28, I am going to be participating in the 3rd annual Radical Realtime Virtual Collaboration event. It's an unconference where people can lead sessions on whatever topic they want related to the overall topic, which this year is Innovation Cloud: Virtual Spaces for Creative Collaboration. To minimize technical difficulties, the organizers are encouraging organizers to use a chat collaboration tool for the session, and to prepare any upfront material, well, upfront. I'm organizing a session called Improving Virtual Collaboration - Managing the Motivations, and I put together this video as my upfront material. If you find the questions interesting, you can join the event which will begin at 10am ET(in the US) and at the same time around the world. The sound is a little up and down at the beginning, but it gets better after about a minute. I hope to report after the event on what my worldwide friends have to say in response to the questions, and also to say more about the collaboration I mention in the intro.

Improving Virtual Collaboration - Managing the Motivations from David Friedman on Vimeo.