Faster Than 20

In my last blog post , I wrote about ways in which friction has been beneficial to my work and how, in this world of AI, we still have choices as to when and how we try to eliminate friction. I closed my post with the question: What are areas in your work or in your life where adding friction might actually help you? The post and the question resonated with several of you and led to some great com...

Much of my work is about making it easier for groups to achieve their goals. Often, that entails finding ways to eliminate friction. But sometimes, the best way to help groups achieve their goals is to add friction. Consider exercise. Most of us don’t live in a world where we need to lift large weights above our heads or run long distances to get from one place to another. Technology has eliminate...

Facilitation isn't just what happens in the room. Time and care invested in the meeting's design can be far more impactful.

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 Intellip...

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...

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 reaso...

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...

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 ev...

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 libation...

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...