April 2, 2013 | Groupaya

New Groupaya Brown-bag: Facilitating High-Conflict Groups

by Rebecca Petzel

Groupaya brown-bags are back! We’d love you to join us April 16th at 1pm for a conversation about navigating high conflict groups. Kristin Cobble, our coach, consultant, and facilitator extraordinaire with years of experience helping groups lean-in to conflict has volunteered to share her experience and wisdom. We’d also love to learn from the field, so come prepared to share whatever tips you might have as well as actively listen and learn. Our goal is to explore facilitation techniques to help with high-conflict situations.

We’re hosting it at the Capital One 360 Cafe, 101 Post St (see map). Please let us know if you can join by RSVP’ing in the comments below so we’re sure to have enough space! The brown-bag will officially run from 1-2pm, but we’ll be around and have time afterwards to chat until 2:30.

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January 21, 2013 | Groupaya

Groupaya 1.0

by Kristin Cobble

Groupaya 1.0

It has been 3 weeks since Eugene’s official announcement to the world that he is leaving Groupaya. Many have asked me, “What is next for Groupaya?”

Before I answer that, I want to acknowledge some of what we created together in Groupaya 1.0, the first two and a half years of Eugene, Rebecca, Amy, Betty and I, and more recently, Natalie and Dana, working together on client projects, and in building a company.

It has been an amazing journey. We have delivered great work together. We have learned so much together. We have consistently exceeded our client’s expectations. And most meaningful to me, we have developed a really sweet community, with permeable walls, that takes care of its members.

Part of what inspired Eugene and I to create Groupaya together was a shared vision about “organizational development on steroids.”

For me, “organizational development on steroids” means expanding what groups can do together, both within and beyond face-to-face meetings. It also means experimenting with ways of making development and change faster and more fun. While we experiment with our clients, we have learned the most from our experiments with ourselves.

Some of the ideas Eugene and the team have implemented, both within Groupaya and within clients, include:

Cross-organization project wikis – improving communication and knowledge creation, while saving a ton of time.
Internal chat pages – enabling us to be a virtual team, yet stay connected with what each other is working on, how we are feeling, and what we are learning.
“Kangaroo Court” – making a game of providing feedback to colleagues, improving both the quantity and quality of feedback, as well as the fun quotient in giving and receiving it.

Groupaya 1.0 has been all about doing great work with clients, experimenting on ourselves, and building a culture that supported the learning and growth of the team. It was challenging to build a company from the ground up, but we learned a ton, and had a lot of fun in the process. I will be forever grateful to Eugene for starting this journey with me.

I’m still living in the question, “What is next for Groupaya?” We’ll see! Whatever comes next will build on what has already been created. And we’ll let you know when we know.

December 31, 2012 | Groupaya

New Adventures

by Eugene Eric Kim

Earlier this month, I made the hardest, most gut-wrenching decision of my professional life. Effective today, I am leaving Groupaya, which I co-founded in late 2011 with the amazing, wonderful Kristin Cobble.

My reasons for leaving are simple, although the decision was anything but. I have a set of things I want to accomplish, both personally and professionally, and I did not feel like I was on the best path to accomplish all of them.

My goals are to be the best human being I can possibly be and to do things that are joyful, impactful, and nourishing. With Groupaya, I was accomplishing the latter and then some, but at the expense of the former. I wasn’t finding the balance I wanted, and as I looked inward and ahead, I realized that I wasn’t going to get it unless I hit the reset button and found a different path.

In explaining to my team my feelings, I told them the story of Göran Kropp, as described by Jon Krakauer in his book, Into Thin Air. In 1996, Kropp attempted to go from sea level to the top of Mount Everest using only his own power. That meant riding a bike from Sweden to the Himalayas, then attempting to summit the world’s highest mountain without additional oxygen. He got an hour away from the summit, but realized that the conditions weren’t right, and had the discipline and wisdom to turn around. Famed mountaineer, Rob Hall, ran into Kropp on his way back down the mountain, and, in expressing his admiration for Kropp’s decision, explained, “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill. The trick is to get back down alive.”

I don’t claim to have done anything as challenging as Kropp did, but I at least have an inkling for how he must have felt. Leaving Groupaya feels a bit like turning around just an hour away from the summit. We surpassed most of our goals for 2012, our first year in business. We had amazing clients, we did top-notch work, and we were constantly learning and improving. We had succeeded in building a high-performance organization with the kind of culture I had always dreamed of. We were collectively practicing what we preached, and we had built a platform that would enable us to leap even further forward. Thanks to my peers and the structures we had put into place, I was doing the best quality work I had ever done.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t practicing as an individual what we were practicing as a group. I need different structures to help me find that balance, and I’m leaving Groupaya and most likely this field in order to find those structures. I have devoted the last 10 years of my life to studying and practicing the art of effective collaboration, and helping others do the same. I’ve given it everything I’ve got. I wish I could have accomplished more, but I’m proud of what I did accomplish. I have zero regrets, and — regardless of what I choose to do next — I will continue to practice this craft. It’s too important not to, and I love doing it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I have some client commitments over the next few months that I need to complete, and I’d like to spend some time writing down what I’ve learned over the past 10 years. Beyond that, I have no idea. Regardless, I will surely share stories about future adventures on my personal blog.

What I do know is that I’ll miss the team terribly. Kristin, Rebecca, Natalie, Amy, Dana, and Betty, you guys mean everything to me, and I will feel forever grateful to you for being such an intimate part of my life and my learning. Many thanks to you and to all my friends who made this past year so rich and rewarding.

November 28, 2012 | Groupaya

Nonprofits, Please Take our Survey on Consultants!

by Eugene Eric Kim

Last year, Shiree Teng approached us with an itch she’s been wanting to scratch for years now. Shiree has been a social justice and community activist for over three decades, and she’s spent a good part of the past few decades focusing on organizational effectiveness, learning, and evaluation work.

One of the things she observed, especially in her role as an advisor to the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness Program, was that nonprofits seem to use consultants quite a bit. If consultants are doing a good job actually helping nonprofits build capacity and do their work more effectively, then this is great news. The problem is, we have no idea if this is true. There’s very little data, and there have been very few studies.

We want to do more than study this. We want to know what opportunities there are to improve how nonprofits work with consultants, and we want to experiment with ways to actually do this.

As a first step, we’ve drafted a national survey in partnership with CompassPoint. We’re asking nonprofit organizations to take 10-15 minutes of their time to tell us how they select consultants and how satisfied they are with their work.

If you’re a nonprofit, please fill out the survey by Friday, December 14, 2012. If you know of others at nonprofits, please share this with them, as we’d like as robust a sample as possible.

We will publish a summary of the survey results, so we all get to learn from this. And if you need any more incentive to fill out the survey, everyone who fills it out will be entered in a drawing for a free iPad. If you’re interested in learning more about this project, we are doing our work openly on the Packard Foundation OE Wiki.

Many thanks!

September 14, 2012 | Groupaya

Our First Year

by Eugene Eric Kim

Laughing together, a frequent occurrence on our team. Photo taken by our friend, Eugene Chan.

Tomorrow, on September 15, 2012, Groupaya celebrates its one year anniversary.

It completely snuck up on all of us. We’ve had our noses to the grindstone this whole year, focusing on doing great, meaningful work, on learning as much as we can, on exploring innovative ways to make a greater impact on the world, and on living our values. It’s been incredibly intense and an absolute joy. We all feel very lucky to have had this experience together this first year.

We’re doing this work, because we want to help create a world that is more alive. That journey has to start with each of us, individually. For me personally, doing this challenging, meaningful work in collaboration with amazing people has brought me alive every day.

Here’s a sampling of what we accomplished in our first year:

We’ve been spending the bulk of our time and energy facilitating a multi-stakeholder dialogue in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta around water issues for the Delta Conservancy. We’re calling it the Delta Dialogues. This is one of the most critical issues California is currently grappling with, and it’s without question the hardest problem I’ve ever tackled (which also makes it one of the most enjoyable).
We designed and facilitated a participatory visioning process for the Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership. Over 120 people representing over 50 organizations participated in self-organized conversations over a four month period to develop a 10-year roadmap for the Bay Area arts education community.
We facilitated leadership team meetings for IntraHealth, Hawaii Community Foundation, and Amyris, and strategy workshops for Code for America and The Hub.
We provided leadership coaching for Amyris, LinkedIn, and eSilicon.
We shared what we’ve been learning and thinking about, both informally through this blog and through brown bags, and formally at conferences. This past spring, I gave a talk at the GEO National Conference on leading change. This past week, my friend, business partner, and Groupaya co-founder, Kristin Cobble, returned to her hometown of Tulsa to speak to local grantmakers about learning organizations.
We applied our own frameworks for becoming a high-performance, learning organization to ourselves. For me, this has been the most gratifying and humbling part of this past year. It’s much easier to help others with this than to do it yourself!

We had the pleasure of doing all this work with many of our friends, including Jeff Conklin (CogNexus), Joe Mathews, Heather McLeod Grant (Monitor Institute), Vanda Marlow, Thomas Souza-Buckup, Mariposa Leadership, Pete Forsyth (Wiki Strategies), Shiree Teng, CompassPoint, Stanley Jones (Diligent Creative), and Matt Sengbusch.

We also added two new members to our team: Natalie DeJarlais and Dana Reynolds. Along with our original core of Kristin, Rebecca Petzel, Amy Wu Wong, and Betty Marcon, these wonderful people make up the Groupaya family. I am humble and grateful to get to do such meaningful work with such a caring, passionate, brilliant group.

This past week, our friend, Mariah Howard, sent us this delightful one-year anniversary gift.

Amy (our Director of Delight) suggested that we share Mariah’s wonderful gift more broadly, and so she decided to make it our official logo for the next week.

Thanks to Mariah, to all the friends we got to work with this past year, and to all of you for being a part of our first year! Can’t wait to kick-off Year 2!

September 10, 2012 | Groupaya

The Visual Mapping Challenge

by Rebecca Petzel

I’m pleased to announce Groupaya’s Visual Mapping Challenge! Before I get into any details, I’ll quickly explain why we’re taking on this challenge.

The why?

We love helping groups take collective action. Generally, the first step towards collective action is building shared understanding. Now helping a group build shared understanding and focus around just simple organizational issues can often feel like a daunting task. (If you’re struggling to do so with your own team or group, we always recommend some simple whiteboarding or shared screens to help bring everybody on the same page.) When the issue is complex, the task of building shared understanding can seem almost impossible.

Luckily, we have a few slightly more advanced tools in our toolbox to do just that. Similar to whiteboarding, many of our favorite techniques rely upon shared visual mapping. These include Dialogue Mapping, Systems Thinking Mapping, and visual facilitation. We’ve seen all three make a powerful impact in helping groups navigate complexity… collectively.

The question we often ask ourselves (or debate vigorously over drinks) is, which technique is the best? Okay, okay. Not the best. ;) We know each technique has different strengths in different situations for different groups. What we are looking to do with the Visual Mapping Challenge is push our collective understanding of each tool’s strengths and under what circumstances each technique thrives.

The what?

We know all three of these tools are extremely powerful for helping solve complex challenges. We figured, as long as we are learning with the team, why don’t we take the opportunity to tackle some of the real problems facing our friends and community? And thus, the visual mapping challenge was born.

This is where you come in. We’re looking for a group that is tackling a really complex challenge and that thinks it could use some help getting to the bottom of it. We’ll invite you into our experiment, divide your group into three, and give you three different (extremely) experienced facilitators helping you all tackle your challenge. You’ll see below a beautiful map by Mariah Howard that not only demonstrates what we’re proposing, but also serves as a tremendous example of the power of visual facilitation.

We think this is a pretty remarkable opportunity for the right network to get some world class support. If you think you have the complex problem this visual mapping challenge needs to succeed, drop us a line. And for the rest of you, stay tuned to this space to hear more as the challenge unfolds.

Map by Mariah Howard

January 17, 2012 | Groupaya

Gut Check on Working Strategically

by Eugene Eric Kim

About a year ago, Stanford Business School professor Bob Sutton, blogged one of my favorite rants. He wrote:

Big hairy goals don’t mean much without thousands of small wins. My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I have argued for years that implementation, not strategy, is what usually separates winners from losers in most industries, and generally explains the difference between success and failure in most organizational change efforts, sales campaigns and so on.

Atul Gawande drives this point home even further in his remarkable book on high-performance medicine, Better. He opens his book by explaining that every year, two million people in the U.S. get an infection while visiting hospitals, and 90,000 of those people die. Doctors have known the stunningly simple solution to this problem for 150 years: wash your hands. There are strict guidelines for how to wash your hands and how often, yet according to Gawande, almost no one follows them.

Having a good strategy doesn’t mean much if you’re not implementing it well. Knowing this has strongly influenced how I work with clients. Developing strategy is not enough. You need to help clients work strategically.

Two weeks into 2012, I and my colleagues at Groupaya are experiencing first-hand how difficult it is to work strategically. Last year, we spent several months developing our 2012 goals and strategy. I’m confident that our goals and strategy are good and that we’re strongly aligned around them. And yet last week, we realized that we’re not even a month into the new year and that we’re already doing a mediocre job of implementing our strategy. We’ve been okay at doing what we said we were going to do, but we’ve been poor at not doing what we said we wouldn’t do.

Realizing this has been a great gut check, and although we need to improve, it’s not time to panic. Working strategically is hard, and it requires… well, hard work. If 90,000 Americans die every year because doctors don’t wash their hands frequently enough, we can forgive ourselves (at least a little bit) for not working as effectively as we could be.

That said, there are structural things that we’ve done that have helped us a lot. For starters, we had a good strategic planning process, one that resulted in a good strategy and strong collective ownership.

We also talk about our goals relentlessly, almost religiously. We have a standing weekly meeting to discuss our goals as a team, we have a dashboard that tracks our progress, and we mention our goals often in the context of our every day work.

Finally, we’ve created space for ourselves to assess and reflect on our progress. Without that space, it’s impossible to learn and to act on that learning.

With these structures in place, I feel confident that we have the support we need to implement our strategy effectively. Now we just need to do it!

January 11, 2012 | Groupaya

Brown Bag: Participatory Strategic Planning

by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve just started working with an arts learning and leadership network. We’re leading them through a highly participatory visioning and strategic planning process. This project is particularly unique because we have very ambitious goals for the process, but we’re planning on being extremely light touch as facilitators and consultants.

In particular, the process will center around self-organized, meaningful conversations. We expect most of the meetings to be self-organized by stakeholders, and we won’t be at most of them. In other words, we’ll be creating space, offering coaching, and trusting the group to manage itself.

The questions we’re grappling with are:

What does this process look like?
How do you aggregate self-organized, decentralized conversations into a coherent, meaningful storyline?
As a consultant, how do you let go enough to let the process happen, while also intervening enough so that you contribute to its success in meaningful ways?

For tomorrow’s Groupaya brown bag (12-1:30pm, Thursday, January 12, 2012 at Fiore Caffe in San Francisco), I’ll introduce the project and our current thinking. Then I’d love to do a peer consultation and hear all of your thoughts on the above questions.

As always, everyone is welcome, but please RSVP below in the comments so we know to expect you. Hope to see you there!

January 2, 2012 | Groupaya

2012 Goals and Strategy

by Eugene Eric Kim

We spent a good part of last year discussing our goals and aspirations — who we wanted to be, what we wanted to accomplish, and how we wanted to do those things. As we started aligning around a big picture, Rebecca led us through a more formal planning process to think through our goals and strategy for 2012. We’d like to share what we came up with, and we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Vision and Mission

All of our thinking starts with our big picture vision for a world that is alive.

A world that is alive is a world that is humane, just, and sustainable…

… where groups are open, high-performing, and always improving…

… where individuals are healthy, curious, courageous, connected, and fulfilled.

Groupaya’s mission is to help groups — be they teams, organizations, networks, or nations – work together more skillfully to create their desired future.

We think we’re unique in a lot of ways. For starters, while our vision of the world is far-reaching and soulful, our orientation is around activation, action, and learning-by-doing. Our path to achieving the unimaginable is to start moving.

We’ve worked with traditional organizations — both large and small — and we’ve worked with grassroots communities. This diversity of experience has helped us understand some fundamental truths about groups and group work, and it’s also made us realize how much we still don’t know. We have to constantly challenge our assumptions and seek wisdom from others to do our best work. Our success, ultimately, is dictated by how effective we are at learning with others and acting on what we learn.

Having a learning orientation isn’t enough. We think it’s critical to share what we learn as broadly as possible. By acting, we impact groups directly, and we learn in the process. By sharing that learning, we have the potential to impact the world in much bigger ways.

On the surface, we are a consulting firm. Ultimately, we want to be a place where people — be they clients or peers — go to learn how to work more skillfully with groups.

Goals and Strategy

We want to be great consultants, and we want to share our learnings widely and usefully, but we also want to build a great organization. It’s not enough to help groups be good at working together to create their future more skillfully. We have to be good at doing those things ourselves. Groupaya needs to be a shining example of a high-performance, soulful, learning organization.

In this vein, our focus for 2012 is to build our capacity as an organization and to start building the capacity of our network, our community. We have three goals:

Do meaningful, sustainable, and learningful client work
Share our learning, both internally and externally
Create space for renewal, learning, and play

Meaningful, Sustainable, Learningful Client Work

We have been extremely fortunate to work on some amazing, important, and innovative projects over the years with people whose values strongly align with ours. That’s only made us hungrier. We don’t want to sit on our laurels and simply do work that’s safe. We want to do meaningful, learningful (a Rebecca word that I love) work.

(If you have such a project, we want to hear from you! Don’t be shy!)

These projects need to sustain us without overwhelming us. Our goal is to devote 40 percent of our working hours to client work, while bringing in enough revenue to sustain ourselves and slowly grow.

Sharing our Learnings Internally and Externally

I’ve worked closely with Kristin for two years now, and I talk with her just about every day. As you might imagine, I’ve learned a ton from her. And yet, what I’ve learned so far has only scratched the surface of what I want to learn from her.

We have much to share as an organization, but we need to start by being good at sharing within our own organization. Plus, we’re small, so we have no excuse! We’ve already developed some great tools and processes, and we plan on improving these throughout the year.

I’m personally really excited about this. It’s one thing to help clients with their knowledge sharing practices, it’s another thing to do it with your own group. We’re using some simple tools internally with some light customizations here and there, but our secret sauce so far has been around our processes and practices.

One of those processes is our weekly brown bag, which we started last year and plan to continue more regularly this year. The intent is to share knowledge internally, but we advertise and do these brown bags openly so that they act as a way to share our knowledge externally as well.

In this vein, we also plan on leveraging this web site and blog in our efforts to share knowledge externally. The goal is less about building an audience and more about building our muscles in public: practicing regular, useful synthesis and communicating with our network. We want to tell both our stories and the stories of our community.

Despite our focus on content over distribution, in the three months our web site has been up, we’ve had over a thousand unique visitors from all over the world, 43 percent of whom visited more than once. We’ve noticed a growing number of people sharing our content over Twitter and other social networking sites, and we hope that trend grows this year. (And if you’re one of those who have shared, thank you!)

Finally, as I noted earlier, I truly believe that we have a unique philosophy and approach to how we do our work, which we’re calling “The Groupaya Way.” It’s a philosophy that’s evolved from our experiences and that’s been strongly influenced by our peers — all of you!

We want to articulate that approach and continue to refine it openly and with our community. This will help us be better at what we do, and it will also help our clients and peers better understand us.

Most importantly, it will help us build the capacity of our network. At our core, we are a networked organization, and we draw heavily from our community to punch above our weight. As our projects get bigger and harder, it’s critical that we not only build our own capacity, but the capacity of our peers as well. We hope articulating The Groupaya Way helps us do that.

Space for Renewal, Learning, Play

This is my favorite goal, and it will be the hardest one for us to achieve successfully. When you’re action-oriented, it’s very easy to spend all of your time, well, doing stuff. But it’s not necessarily healthy nor good for business nor good for the world.

In order to learn, you need space to reflect. In order to innovate, you need space to play. In order to help the world, you need to be whole.

We’re committed to making and holding this space for each other. We’ve already started putting some structures into place. Kristin designed an amazing personal development process, and we will hold each other accountable for meeting our personal goals. We’re also monitoring each other’s time closely.

If we’re successful, we’ll be healthier and happier, and we’ll do more, better work.

Feedback

A lot of our goals and strategy are about community — all of you. We hope you’ll stay engaged with us as we pursue these goals. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts as well!

Wishing you all a happy, healthy, New Year!

December 13, 2011 | Groupaya

Brown Bag: The Secret Life of Groups

by Kristin Cobble

Have you ever worked on a good team that you knew had the potential to be a great team, but somehow just didn’t happen? Are you curious about why groups — be they a family, a leadership team, or a project team — sometimes get stuck? Do you ever wonder how to un-stick them? If so, come to this Thursday’s brown bag lunch, where I will be sharing a framework that makes visible the invisible dynamics of groups, based on the work of family systems theorist David Kantor.

If you want to join the conversation, please RSVP in the comments below. Thanks!