Ann Oliveri

IDEO Puts the "I" in Community

Enabling the individual enables the community, writes IDEO's Patrice Martin in the current issue of Patterns. Powerful communities emerge when individuals are encouraged to take ownership and find their voices.

"Funny how an emphasis on “I” leads to a more coherent sense of we," she notes, adding a list of three ways we can put the "i" in community:

1. Make your customers co-owners

Let your customers own the experience with you. Push past the comfort zone of control and see how far your experience grows.

2. Attract personality with personality

Want to attract passion? Be passionate. Dare to show your personality in order to encourage others to put just as much or more into the experience.

3. Practice stealth facilitation

Edit in the background. Authenticity and spontaneity should appear in the forefront, not control.

Doesn't that sum up the best advice for handling communities of practice?  Easy to see why I love the people of IDEO!  BTW, if you'd like to play with them, and talk more about building community, don't miss The Vine Salon at IDEO on November 17 at IDEO's HQ in Palo Alto.

Is This You?

Are you fascinated by something different every week?

Does the thought of concentrating on one topic, skill or job for the rest of your life horrify you?

Do you start lots of projects but rarely finish any of them?

Does trying to choose between all your interests stress you out?

Are you currently reading 5, 10 or even more books?

Then you are a “scanner,” a term used by life and careers coach Barbara Sher and celebrated by creative coach John Williams at Scanners Central, who advocates "do what you want and make it pay."   

Rather than segment your audience by age, maybe you need to segment by how people prefer to interact.  Attention-deficit scanners can make your social media efforts sing.   Click on Social Media Memes and Mashups to see San Sherma's fabulous presentation at the July's Scanner Night on how to use social media, "making sense of it all."

Thanks to my sleep-deprived, UK-based friend Amy for the heads-up. 

(Dis)Engagement

 How can we engage members in our work if association employees are leaving the better part of themselves at home?  For all the lip service given to "engagement" these days, I am amazed by the lack of engagement among association employees. 

Recently, I was hitting a brick wall of stony indifference with the senior management of a well known association, so I peeled them off for personal interviews.  One on one, I was impressed with each exec's energy and ideas, but when restored to the group, everyone shut down and spoke like robots.

The behavior was not a product of the recession--fear of losing one's job--this was the culture, engineered by the CEO to maintain an illusion of control.  The result was a senior team that quit long ago, but are still on the job. 

There is an alternative, one neatly articulated by Henry Mintzberg in the July-August Harvard Business Review on "Rebuilding Companies as Communities." 

Mintzberg argues for an alternative form of leadership, "a more modest form of leadership that might be called engaged and distributed management," what he calls communityship.  "A community leader is personally engaged in order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise initiative."

To create community at work, Mintzberg recommends that you:

1. Start with small groups of committed managers.
2. Take time to reflect on shared experiences.
3. Use insights from these reflections to trigger small initiatives with potential to become big strategies.
4. Model behavior for others in the organization.
5. "(C)ommunityship is firmly established when the members reach out in socially active, responsible, and mutually beneficial ways to the broader community."

"(H)ealthy organizations take corporate social responsibility seriously and gain significant benefits in return. Employees of a company that barely functions as a community can hardly be expected to care about any other community.  But members of a company that has a robust sense of community realize how much their organization depends for sustained success on constructive engagement with the communities around it."

Do less. Be more. Engage members through opportunities to learn and grow, professionally and personally, reflecting on shared experiences in a community of practice, pursuing social justice while making a living.  And do it in every single activity you offer.

That's engagement.  The rest is empty promises of features and benefits in a brochure.

Citizens Once More

The Good Citizen's Handbook: A Guide to Proper Behavior is a tongue-in-cheek tour of truisms from my childhood--advice on being a good neighbor, showing the proper respect to authority, good penmanship--all the stuff that was beaten into us in the 50s, rejected in the 60s, and cynically repurposed to sell detergent and win elections ever since.

Its Dick-and -Jane illustrations and hokey lessons aside, what's remarkable about writer and designer Janet McKnight-Trontz' 2001 pocket guide is the reminder that social norms are a shared assumption about personal behavior. 

Social responsibility is the sum of our individual actions.

No one wants to return to the bigotry and mores of the 50s, but there's no reason we can't be more than consumers and once again be citizens responsible for our shared future.

Community: The Structure of Belonging

Structure changes behavior. An association's structure creates the space and terms of engagement--defining  roles, norms, power, and position. Structure trumps governance. 

So can we create a better structure to engage and inspire our members and stakeholders?

Peter Block's most recent book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, offers a distinctive alternative.

"My intent" he writes, "is to provide structural ways to create the experience of belonging, not just in those places where people come to just be together socially, but especially in places where we least expect it. This includes those places where people come together to get something done. These are our meetings, dialogs, conferences, planning processes––all those occasions where we gather to reflect on and decide the kind of future we want for ourselves."

In Community, Block turns closely held assumptions about leadership, problem-solving, and citizenship literally inside out, inverting them to create possibilities.  For example, if you believe the audience creates the performance, less effort is required inventing what is on the stage. Every auditorium and conference room would be redesigned. Chairs would be mobile and the audience would have clear sight lines with each other.

"Community building requires a concept of the leader as one who creates experiences for others--experiences that in themselves are examples of our desired future," Block writes. "The leader's task is to structure the place and experience," to create the context and the conversation, asking great questions and listening closely to the answers.

Fifteen years ago, another book by Peter Block, Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest, broke away from the pack and now he's done it again.

Being Human

In Miami, Patti Digh opened the final day at the Great Ideas Conference, sharing what she is learning as a mother of two girls as well as from the growing community attracted by her work, her blog, and her book, Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally.

Watch her presentation and especially note her approach to confronting complex problems, like raising children or becoming socially responsible.  It will instantly reduce stress and confirm what you know to be true about being human.

The best part of opening the day with this experience was seeing how it changed the rest of my day: how my perspective shifted; how I interacted with people; how I absorbed meaning from the sessions that followed.

Fortunately, the final session I participated in was Doug Stevenson's session on Emotional Eloquence: The Lost Language of Leadership.  Doug demonstrates and reveals how to connect with any audience, to both inspire and teach, and to be a truly authentic leader, all in 75 minutes.  We learned how to "speak from our head with our heart wide open," creating trust with story and maintaining an emotional connection with those we wish to lead.  It was 75 minutes I will never forget.  Using his approach, you can be just as memorable.

On reflection, I can see all of these ideas in one participant who happened to choose four of the same sessions I did and I got to know better over three days.   Mindy Walker works out of Kansas City for the Missouri State Teachers Association.  Her stories of early career experiences teaching in correctional facilities, raising two boys, and now showing up in the schools where her members teach brought home to me how being human is at the heart of all our work.

Before you cut your association's travel budgets, think twice.  Now is the time you show up, to literally be there for your members.  Crowd the bench where they sit, as Patti said.  Tell the stories that connect us together, as Doug said.  Be human at work, online, and by phone.  Live intentionally.

Art of Aspiration

In the Heights is a 21st century Broadway musical, rooted in tradition but freed from cliches.  Lucky for me that this transcendent Latino valentine captured my five traveling companions' hearts as well as mine.  Later all revealed that they despise musicals and were only being polite when they agreed to go with me. No pressure there.

A week earlier, I went--alone, come to think of it--to the 50th anniversary revival of West Side Story in Washington, cashing in reward points for the ticket.  I left at intermission, bored and a little embarrassed by the dated sentiments.  I love the music, the dancers were great, and the addition of dialog in Spanish was welcome, but it was a little like seeing Gilbert and Sullivan, a charming curiosity but empty.  And, the contrast to In the Heights could not be more telling.

Created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's narrator and lead, In the Heights captures the dreams and ambitions of the children of immigrants, tethered to the neighborhood and supported by family--found and extended.  It's a master course in community building.

The voices are authentic, emotions conflicted, themes universal, and all set to a new beat, resonating with musical theater to a rap base and salsa splash.   What was so striking about this show, though, is its affirmation of the power of the arts, an individual's creativity, to create meaning and perspective, expressing an age-old quest in an artful, new way.  Now, that's something to aspire to in our work.