Top 3 learnings:

1 -highly motivational speaker + prayer can bring ppl to high emotional empowerment 

2 – People need to be holding both the reality of current (bad) conditions and a powerful and optimistic vision for their own power. Need to hold both those things to be able to win. 

3 – Our optimism might be the result of a culture of performing optimism for each other in ways that aren’t benefiting us

Other learnings:

• What we thought would be a good venue for measuring (using chat in public meetings) may not have actually been. 
• Making sure person who delivers the question is clearer (if Ashlin had done it herself it wouldn’t’ have been in the same energetic light)
• The person who delivered it was very inspirational
• Is there an opportunity to follow up with everyone? Email everyone and ask the question again?
• Let’s get clear on what we learned? Gathering learnings also from Ashlin or other folks on the call. Maybe analysis from Calvin or Andrew just from hearing about it.
• It was an energizing moment – the question wasn’t so much of a data collection question as a rhetorical moment to get people excited. 
• People aren’t reliable at reporting emotional empowerment if you just ask them “are you emotionally empowered?” – the key could be figuring out how to ask without asking
• What are ways that we can be paying attention to emotional empowerment in our trainings, in the way organizers interact with leaders, etc. Need to know our starting point.
• Emotional empower is really quickly influenced by tone/person delivering message

Want to try again/measure emotional empowerment again at Jan 2 meeting

HMW learn about the impacts of our work on emotional empowerment over the long term?

What are the factors that influenced emotional empowerment?

• What are we asking?
• Who delivers it?
• What is their tone?

• If we could have rearranged the timeline, we would’ve included a lot more time in the internship for culminating events. Only the last ~2 weeks were about turning the folks we contacted into action and pulling off that action. 
• Community organizing is harder than workplace organizing (even when it’s union members talking to each other!)
• We only know how to do this kind of leadership development with rank and file leaders when folks have a full time engagement over a period of weeks.
• There is more to work with if we can figure out how ppl can do this in addition to jobs – can reach a larger body of people that way

• Is it worth doing more experimentation around a program that fits in w/ people’s regular jobs and families? Or do we work with the window we know we have each year with the teachers?
• Could we shift our calendar/curriculum to get more out of the six week timeline?
• Could you design something in partnership with the 3 union staff that could roll this out to other unions?

-Having a consistent form of cultural activity especially singing during chapter meetings and rallies creates a deep sense of solidarity and has the power to compel others to join

-We do not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to music creation – we can use popular songs in any genre and substitute/remix lyrics rooted in our issue work

-Having a sub-committee among member chapters to lead this process is a new kind of role for member leaders to consider in our base building work

-There are multiple ways to build relationships with different organizers, co-workers, and members and engage with their culture. We just have to be willing to provide people with the space to do so. 

-Everybody is looking for community, we just have to be willing to create it. 

How can we continue to do this differently?

What could be as effective if not more effective than music?

Are there a set group of members/ leaders who would be interested in incorporating music into our work?

We don’t need to be experts here – could we come up with lyrics that we test out? Try out at a meeting?

People are uncomfortable sharing their cultural experiences due to a lack of understanding of what culture is. 

Sharing your cultural experiences by yourself is stressful – it’s easier to do it in a group of people.

-Sharing = vulnerability 

-Pressure around the definition of culture

-But culture is anything that makes you happy (Joaquin, 2021). No pressure around it (decolonize this?).

– “Anything that makes you happy is culture” – Joaquin

• Everything that makes you who you are is culture – it doesn’t need to be art or literature 
• Different cultures have things  in common, use those commonalities to create a communal cultural experience
• Shift framing from “teaching” to “learning” – aka less about person teaching and more about everyone else learning together

How might we make people more comfortable sharing their culture?

HMW decolonize our understanding of what culture is and share that with members?

How do we reframe “culture” as XYZ

• Noticing that we need more time to evaluate the efficiency of the form.
• We haven’t had capacity to review the form to get a since if this is enough information to access and make faster decisions.

We will do another iteration of this experiment to access the form for another month

Is this form giving us enough information to know that we want to move forward with new potentials?

• Conversation during staff meeting went well!  Prompts put individuals in touch with their own story.  Storytelling makes what is invisible visible again.  
• Created a moment to learn by doing (learning action cycle)  Instead of continuing to explain cultural strategy, we just did it!  We created something that has all five of the elements.
• Next time we do this session, we want to make space/time for reflections on what we just experienced…  “Reflecting On!”  
• This session opened up a portal to jump into a new level of understandings

• Spaciousness in small groups allows for what needs to arise to bubble up and also a genuine sharing. 
• Question Harvesting was a simple way to get people connected to what they wanted to learn. 
• At the staff meeting, the design of the check-in by Monica built a collective understanding of how we as a team were doing which was different from giving an individual check in. Created and weaved a collective. Then made learning and practice richer, able to meet places that could have been throny with curiosity and fun. 
• Something about the way we enter learning that taps into our success (tapping into all brains activated, all our ways of knowing)- Opening space!!!

We want to carry these lessons learned forward.

How might we get more panoramic awareness of multiple ways of knowing BEFORE entering a “learning” space?

• Really highlighted the importance of cross department collaboration. 
• Having strong relationships and team dynamics is key to have set before you start experiments. 
• It’s possible to incorporate new tools and technology into our existing organizing models with the right focus and context. 
• Sometimes when you’re hesitant about something you just need to push through and make it happen!

We decided to break the experiment down into pieces. And that was really helpful to get this moving. 

Nat decided from this to do some more thinking and work around finding the best CRM and tracking tool for organizing work.

1. How could we use this tool as things go ‘back to normal’? Combining texting and in person tactics as those become more available. 
2. Are we structured internally as a team the best way? Are we meeting opportunities and moments for growth when we don’t’ work as collaboratively?
3. Do we have the right systems for accurately tracking all the work the organizing team is doing?

• It’s challenging to be generative, reflective, and celebratory all in one event.
• People really wanted to celebrate and not return to a discussion about the crises. It was important to recognize that shift in conditions and create a moment to exhale together.
• Goodie Bags, drawing, highlighting specific leaders all helped make this more than a usual zoom celebration. 
• Deep listening from design team, follow up with STP support and integration of design team feedback worked well.

• At least two of the groups want to continue fellowship in 2021.
• Some ideas from this design and from the meeting drawings will be built upon in 2021.

• The 6-week learning cycle was really successful and a good model to stick with for 2021 
• Was a good affirmation of the process we’ve outlined before — Synching data → Sharing for feedback → Reflecting with groups -> Identifying for groups areas where they could improve how they create and track data around their programs. 
• Was super helpful for the funder to show all this work around metrics tracking. 
• Getting the data staff and groups together on a call was really insightful and a good proof of concept for next year. 
• Dashboard was something the groups wouldn’t do on their own — allowed us to flex our comparative advantages that other groups don’t do on their own.

We decided to not just do a voter contact dashboard but also to attempt to build out a membership pipeline dashboard that has been really useful.

• Will affirm to keep using 6-week experiment cycles. 
• Proven value of having data staff meet together and share questions/learnings.

We were not able to move this experiment forward and want to continue to consider this experiment in the future.

This was too big of a chunk of experiment given the timing and our team culture. We made a smaller experiment that focused instead on training organizers on the tool first.

 

*Photo from Disabled and Here.

This was too big of a chunk of experiment given the timing and our team culture. We made a smaller experiment that focused instead on training organizers on the tool first.

• Need space in the mass base organizer role to spend with individuals to be able to mobilize more effectively.  This was second time asked MN Solidarity FB and Thrive list to participate and generally there has been a dip in engagement.   

• Social Media stats- this experiment could be used as a baseline and more realistic about how hard it can be to get new members and engagement.

• To be successful in the 50 cities campaign, we need to create a system for interpersonal organizing (and one on one’s in greater MN) in balance with virtual tools and support in roles.

• In order to successfully statewide banner drop you need more than a week to plan (at least two weeks). Also need to bring more partner organizations in to plan to tap into each other’s bases and bring in a Greater MN deep base team of Organizers (St Cloud and Duluth).

 

 

• Block 1-2 hours a week on calendar to cold call and talk with people in Greater MN. 
• Block at least an hour a week to work on 50 cities plan.

Lessons learned: 

• What we do deeper w/ our deepbase is well reflected in our mass base, they don’t feel misaligned.

• Younger people engaging on the deep & mass level who may respond better to issue & identity based messaging.

• Cross posting IG content to Facebook gave our Facebook engagement metrics a massive boost 280%.

• There are new ways of being together that we need to integrate into events.

• People loved being invited behind the scenes.  

• Within ‘Remember in November’ it was really hard to do phone calls right now. But made the choice to do more texting which worked better. 

• Decided to start cross posting IG content to our Facebook team. So made us look at what we can do in our comms department in a more thorough way.

1. In ‘lifting the veil’ behind politics, how much is too much? What do people want to know? What can we share publicly?
2. How do we get alignment between organizing and comms internally, Deep & Mass Base? What’s the infrastructure we need to build for that — all of our platforms, strategy, usage, networks?

• Learned a lot of lessons about turnout — even if people sign up you need to put in that extra work to confirm to make sure. Lots who signed up didn’t show up and those who didn’t sign up showed up.

• Great value in creating interpersonal relationships and listen and absorb what people are passionate about and care about. With first parent info meeting, one on one recruitment and this supply drive we were able to hear from other people and how they were feeling (fears, excitement, what wanted to change). Now can use that to figure out what our work looks like going forward.

• Learning curve on how to coach organizer fellows, there were challenges but this project solidified us as a team. Watching growth of fellows was impactful, not all peaches and cream but the experience was rewarding.

• People who came through had a good feeling and community respect for these drives. Smaller attendance enabled deep engagement, if had 100 people this wouldn’t have been possible.

• Penny budget in real life and life size was awesome, want to always do it in a playground in more physical way, feels like convos were different because of this adaptation.

How do we manage this data?

How can we make data easy for front line folks?

• Create clear roles and responsibilities for volunteer leaders
• Create smaller leadership opportunities as pathways to bigger ones.
• Leaders are willing to participate in planning and decision making within a clear structure.
• Empower and guide volunteer leads help them become decision-makers.

• Making room for leaders to have expanding and growing roles, rather than a static role. 
• Be explicit about how we build decision making into all of our leadership roles, not just execution. 

 

1. How can we structure a leadership model where our Leads are also managing up to 5 people? 
2. How do we scale and still keep that alignment? At what size does scale start to impact quality? Both for the volunteer leaders and as well for organizing staff? 
3. How can we maintain and develop deeper relationships with leaders when we can’t meet in person?

We were not able to move this experiment forward and want to continue to consider this experiment in the future.

We were not able to move this experiment forward and want to continue to consider this experiment in the future.

Experiments need to start as experiments. A data project like this that looks at work and doesn’t have a learning stance and inquiry behind it, therefore failed as an experiment.  

• Some attendees came to events but still think of themselves as “New TAMN members” → Interesting observation. Had over 60 RSVPs and over 30 attendees. Doubled turnout from the first call. 
• Better integration of the organizing team into the call this time, must  keep integrating the organizing team more, to develop clear on ramps to immediate leadership as people were ready to do something big together.
• Need a wider and more racially diverse volunteer leaders to help lead these calls.

• Likely to continue doing these welcome calls in September. 
• Inspired Jess to start making a member video w/ some leaders
  • Leaders telling their story. 
  • Listing different ways people can get involved. 
  • Will send the video out and ask people to join by giving $5. 

• Jess is willing to join the next DeepBase cohort call in September to share this experiment and learnings w/ others.

• Dashboard was responding to organizers desired need and was delivered in a week later, this built team morale.  Introduction changed team dynamic 
• Expanding experiment leadership to include Britton started the distributed leadership in the team that Sabrina is looking to build. 
• Dashboard is up in every action and demonstrates progressive progress, will use for continued primary debrief. . 
• Clear visualization of data does increase responsibility of organizers, individually and collectively to work and data documentation.
•  People were willing to join slack, 96, and wanted election results and debrief. Timing of high energy was good for engagement.  People want insider views and perspectives

• Even with primary, Community Safety Kit is still most saved and liked and reposted as a story on Instagram. 
• People want to feel like they are doing something – having a conversation on community safety, this is tangible action and is an opportunity for meaningful engagement and starting to build a shared ideology in their community. 
• Imagine that when doing something that you know other people are doing too that it helps build belonging as the kit is tethered to TAMN. This has implications for cultural strategy work going into the election.

• In order to right size the experiment, made a decision to focus on one neighborhood rather than 3. 
• We may consider the power of the P2P texting tool for our canvas team, including fundraising in a future iteration. 
• We need a basic way to collect data on our deepbase organizing. 
• This experiment reinforced the lack of data infrastructure within the organizing team over the past 5 plus years that the current Organizing team inherited. 
• This experiment has required cross department collaboration in historic ways, eg. data, organizing, canvas, comms teams. 
• This experiment is creating openings to shine light on patterns and opportunities for change and growth for more cross departmental collaboration and especially the organizing team.

• I have often attributed challenges around base building to a management challenge. But starting to see from this experiment that’s not what it is. There’s something to just naming that management tactics alone do not build the hunger for basebuilding. Worth articulating that. I can do everything the Management Center says to do and it’s not enough on its own. 
• Movement is happening with the team but is slow and smaller than needed.
• Naming vulnerability as an act of courage and explicitly inviting it, creates space for people to do it. The one person who shared they didn’t feel connected helped surface how they were challenged in other parts of their work. How can they be hungry for organizing if they’re not connected w/ the team? I feel emboldened to call people in to sharing when there’s no engagement.

• Learnings documented in staff meeting notes: 
  • Appreciated we all took the same time, feels so different
  • No big email boxes
  • No guilt for not working
  • Rejuvenation, Revival
  • Need more rest 
  • Hard to come back 
  • Doing nothing
• Many reported this time was more restful than taking personal vacation time
• Possibly of another interaction…trying again this year

• We’ve seen every one of the fellows move into some heightened level of leadership and activity in response to opportunities and needs of the pandemic and uprisings
• People were happy to see each other and be part of statewide team that is learning a set of skills, but didn’t replace the vibes we would have had with the previously scheduled (and canceled) in-person 2 day retreat. 
• No allergic reaction to the technology focus and using Outvote from fellows which surprised some organizers. There was some unevenness — about 12-14 fellows just dove right in, there was another 4-6 that struggled a bit but grew and are more familiar now. There’s a hunger that we now know people want this. 
• Dispelling fears over people adapting to technology. Making it bilingual helped to welcome folks into the space. Zoom offers a live translation tool. 
• Made error flipping  between admin and user side of app, just focus on user side and experience. Phase two would be to move folks who are ready to move into admin/organizers side.  
• Homework assignments were key. Even with the homework assignments, there is an assumption that fellows will need more practice to really integrate these digital tools in their organizing. 
• Learned for ourselves that people who are not digital organizers or don’t know the groups well should not assume we can throw a training together quickly, second training had some bombs. Good lessons about how to do this responsibly and quickly.

1. How could we make the trainings online feel more like in person organizing events? 
   • (eg. what could the pedagogy of organizing bring to these more technically focused training to make more synergistic connections between tech and organizing)

• Trust self more when approaching larger director team with proposals/decisions.
• As an organizing team, our culture is still developing, Nat started a week before Shelter in Place. 
• Pushback or resistance to Nat’s leadership isn’t a bad thing but an opportunity to communicate and learn and understand what is important to do as a team. 

• Reminder that when you get into the game, every step you take opens up 6 other steps, how do you decide which you are going to go and if at all?
• You have to be ready. You can’t get into the game without being ready. Have to be ready in all senses. Nimble in terms of reading landscape and what is presenting to better know when to move or hold back.  If there is a route you want to go then what do you need to put in place as part of the strategic game? 
• Less stuck on the idea of needing to have conversations, more in space of, I know now that if there is a particular set of things I need to think through, how can I use my rolodex to find who would be a critical support?   (Ex. set of senior leadership meetings, knew b/c of load couldn’t lift on own so key people in our management group are also overloaded but want to consult, so called co-chair of board to talk. And she has supported in translating ideas into agenda).   The key  is relationships and knowing you can activate them in a non-extractive way. So an ongoing practice is cultivating relationships that  you can activate differently at different times.

• They wished there was a more visual dashboard so they could see their work. Want to see what others are doing but more so for themselves to see what the work adds up to. 
• Folks interviewed us, data for their own sense of success in a job that is vague, hard to measure and capture success and know when you’ve achieved success on a short term basis week by week or month by month. Also if had doubt in their work, could look back at data to reflect on how self perception might differ from their work. See the power of the work over time. 

 

3 priorities around why people collect data:

• See own progress, week to week  (these folks also feel uncertain about how colleagues and self are holding work, like they are doing more work than co-workers, speaks to staff dynamic and trust and equitable labor)
• For coaching and accountability
• For use in organizing
  • Storytelling purpose for integrity (not b/c of power), want to be truthful when say we work with 250 congregations. 
  • No one talked about better data for power when talking to elected and funders.
  • No one talked about it being easier to talk to development director/grants manager. 
  • Surprised that no one talked about data collection for a staffing transitions and continuity, especially with COVID because people might have to be out for multiple reasons.

• Requesting changes to data dashboard so people can see their and others data with more ease. 
• Considering how to integrate a data vision across all PICO CA internal staff.

• Trusting the volunteer leaders was key. The volunteer leaders wanted to make space for participants to talk since that’s been what’s most important to them. So following their guidance around the design of the meeting. 
• People on the call were really engaged and talked a lot! Started off kind of shy but volunteer leaders helped make people more comfortable and they shared more as the call went on. 
• Didn’t do a ton of recruitment: Emailed out to 3,000 and got 41 total sign ups, 23 joined. Was a pretty basic email that was framed in the way the leaders framed it — “People are often intimidated to join new things, they don’t know the jargon, feel like imposters getting involved” — so we left it pretty simple. No P2P texting or social media posts. 
• We created tags in EveryAction so we can track these people going forward and what actions they take. 
• Asked people to commit to do a 1-1 or join a text bank and sign up for SMS rapid responses, but not too many people signed up for those things.

 

Idea for 1-1s is that we would have organizers call through the list of attendees and do the follow up and involve them.  Want additional ways to be intentional for how we keep engaging call attendees.

• Continue to make space for participant sharing. 
• Do more outreach for the next one. 
• We decided to do the call at 5:30pm on a weekday, based on the facilitator availability. Going to try the same time on a different day next time. 
• Continue to have staff in support roles for Zoom and slides so that vol leaders could focus on facilitation.

1. Should we explain more about what a 1-1 is? More about the other volunteer roles? Should we focus on just one action ask instead of 3? 
2. Is there a ‘big ask’ you can make that gives people the option to take on more responsibility right away? 
3. Should we do a ‘how did it go’ survey? 
4. Who are the 3,000 people we invited? What else have they done w/ TAMN? What are they interested in? How do they communicate? 
5. How would it change the feel of the call if there was more than 23 people? Or less? 
6. Would we get better participation at different times?

• This tech and organizing collaboration worked! Organizing side was surprised by the pool of people who joined. 
• In real time we saw that people joined the FB group was overwhelmingly via P2P text. In future we want to make sure we can track that better for those we decline. 
• FB Ads was a successful way to bring people into FB page but unclear what percentage of these folks are formerly incarcerated folks and their loved ones. 
• Since 100 people did not answer the questionnaire, we had to pivot and make the FB group broader to include allies in addition to those directly impacted. We are keeping the integrity of centering and following leadership of those directly impacted by incarceration and have created a subset for these members.

 

Across Crowne Royale and Connect 6: 

Want to close the binary of digital and organizing, not to make organizing digital but to implement. Organizing vision has to be more informed by digital tools and that takes some learnings. Understanding what is possible. The big difference between vision and execution. We can make a little less abstract in visioning. Starting to clarify the importance of having a one on one socially distant  in person is one thing but we’re also doing digital one on one’s. So what does that mean?

We are committed to do to build power in distributed fashion and takes step and surrendering to notion that right now we can’t do that the old way. Face to face stuff. There is no magic tool, if we are doing it then how do we get better at organizing digitally? Are there other tools that might be helpful?  (We know organizing). Challenging for our core members and broader community to engage online so what do we do to get them to acclimate and get them used to these tools!

2 weeks post George Floyd’s murder, felt in an emobodied way, the only thing that will carry us through this is relationships. This is the only thing that matters.

• As an organization, we were able to keep moving and bring what we had to the table. Elianne’s leadership reminded those of who were not Black to not turn off our brains to follow Black leadership in this moment but to bring what we have to offer to the table and discern what we need to ask for permission to do and what actions of support we can  just do. 
• Had “wrestling conversations” with individuals including from orgs who have been rivals and groups of people. This mindset of leaning into tension and conflict allowed for more possibilities and a bigger we. 
• People who didn’t have a relationship or organizational relationship – what is our capacity to hold those relationships collectively now?

• Noticeable that MN solidarity on FB with 1230 people was quiet during George Floyd Uprising, not much organic posting. This could be because people didn’t know what to post or that FB wasn’t a meaning making platform and/or because people in the group seem to be whiter and older. 

 

• George Floyd uprising is a place to practice solidarity, but unclear how people in this MN solidarity group are wrestling with solidarity. 

 

• IGTV focused on 3 episodes that focused on political education (pre- uprising) and were well received, want to experiment more there. The experience of working as an ad hoc team with organizers allowed for innovation and creativity.   This collaboration was life giving. Gave confidence and clarity in work. Staff want more ownership like that where they can plug in their own creativity and ideas.  Hard to be organizer and coordinate political education – time to develop the program well while simultaneously organizing full time. Tension here. 

 

• How as staff are we fulfilling need and hunger from members for political education?

 

• During uprisings, IG really took off, people reached out to ask for trainings, resources, where to send PPE, to ask TANN to share content. (Before pandemic had 900 followers, currently have 3000)

• Simultaneity.  Can and need to hold both trauma and excitement of this moment with team. 
• Our own liberation may include healing past traumas, including across generations. This can free us up to hold more in the present and vision more boldly for the future.

• When coming up with an experiment in the abstract, easy to include ideas that don’t pass muster. Can’t do FB add for 12 people, don’t have email addresses. 
• We want to orient the experiment to fit the campaign. 
• Had a timeline to move forward a petition and chose to pause that and pivot to cancel rent. 
• People have varying understandings of digital and organizing. Helpful to bridge those gaps- including vocabulary -and closing gap rapidly, even more important during COVID. 

Go forward with another round, not with email. Focus on text and FB.  Phone calls didn’t fit the needs of the campaign, would take a long time to get through 1000 with one organizer and untrained leader- didn’t match the task of being in an online community. Using P2P and FB ads.  Want to get a sense of how digital ads will work versus hustle or where to place our emphasis.

• Facebook messenger wasn’t an effective tool for one on ones. FB messaged 70 individuals for 2 responses. Could be a variety of technical and cultural reasons for this. Texting when possible resulted in better connection rates. 
• Weekly orientation meetings consistently had 4-5 new members over  2 months, the eviction rally and a petition action helped bring more attention to the Right to Vote campaign.
• Core members with our team since November are having to pivot to digital organizing and are craving in person interaction, even physically distanced.
• This design relied heavily on tapping newly joining members to our online container vs both that AND engaging with existing relationships that core leaders have/may have with other formerly incarcerated individuals and/or loved ones.  Want to make this more of a both/and. 
• Regular experiment meetings with leads (across departments)  is essential to pivot and make choices about emergent issues.

Across Crowne Royale and Connect 6: 

Want to close the binary of digital and organizing, not to make organizing digital but to implement. Organizing vision has to be more informed by digital tools and that takes some learnings. Understanding what is possible. The big difference between vision and execution. We can make a little less abstract in visioning. Starting to clarify the importance of having a one on one socially distant  in person is one thing but we’re also doing digital one on one’s. So what does that mean?

We are committed to do to build power in distributed fashion and takes step and surrendering to notion that right now we can’t do that the old way. Face to face stuff. There is no magic tool, if we are doing it then how do we get better at organizing digitally? Are there other tools that might be helpful?  (We know organizing). Challenging for our core members and broader community to engage online so what do we do to get them to acclimate and get them used to these tools!

Advice for other Baselab groups: 

• Make sure we have specific asks and tasks when onboarding new members.  Whether its Phone Banking, Community Outreach, Training on how to do outreach/recruitment, anything other than “just” recruitment.  A majority of new members have to develop those soft-skills in people interactions. We have to help them overcome the fears our being transparent with their story. All their stories are relevant and powerful.  

• There are people always out there if you invite  them into support. People are generous. Had 8 convos!
• There are a gazillion resources in wisdom and knowledge of people and those people don’t need to be in the mold of JASS. Mistake is to think that we only need to engage with folks in our own image (in political tradition: Marxist with jeans and tshirt and union shoes).  Reminder to tap into  broader knowledge base. 
• Particular understanding of leadership and work culture in the US, JASS office hasn’t been immune to that. Overwork of hours, focus on production and a struggle on your own. No. There are a range of ways of holding the tensions that exist between self and collective care and leadership and a million ways of doing things that don’t mean you’re buying into the narrative of what leadership needs to feel and look like. 
• Shereen was clear she wasn’t going to kill herself at the altar of JASS.  3 months into her leadership, beginning to shift culture at a deep organizational level.

Leadership developed and board approved, three options to hold different working contexts.

 Principles:

1. Acknowledge different working contexts  
2. Don’t be punitive in this moment. 
3. Assess every 2-3 months based on contexts and working with unknowns.
4. Acting into context changes, different categories of work:

• • People who are working overtime, have a day a month off
  • Reduce by 25%
  • 3 hours or less a day: 2 or more children under 7 or elder care.
  • If person contract COVID 19 what are provisions for sick leave and recovery

Focus is not on hours worked but meeting prioritized deliverables. 

Also one meeting free day a week! (Friday)

• There is no liberation by proximity.
• This experiment is about autonomy and self determination and so much of that is linked with bodies, especially women’s bodies.  We must link our healings together.  As WOC, this requires giving ourselves grace and compassion that is often given to others.
• Organizers are realizing that they are usually just told what to do,  now having them run their own campaigns. This can bring up their own feelings of inadequacy. Naming this feeling out is helpful and makes more possible.

Continue another iteration of this experiment

With ongoing pandemic, changed plans to refocus on in person connection. 

Hosted a park breakfast connection with leaders and also moved forward with full staff gathering in park.

Meta-Learnings and other content in Experiment Log.

• Met all self defined measures of success. 
• Relearning that in this moment, I can/need to trust my instinct.  I trusted what needed to happen and what needed to flow. I’ve known that I am good in crisis. Lived through many crises, living into it in a different way. 
• Double edged part, in trusting your instinct, has to acknowledge that the instinct is coming from a place that sometimes mirrors our socialization and how we see the world. Times we can go with it and times when we must ask certain questions to unmask certain assumptions that could be rooted in a mainstream or male stream way of being and doing. 
• We really are stronger if we are able to move together and co-create together. In this moment of my leadership I can be directive and co-creative, it is about discerning about when to be directive and when to hold space so that we build foundation together.  This was a time for directiveness and now we’re entering a co-creative part where my role is to hold the compass for JASS across planning, donors and the board.

• There was always someone to hold space without much planning
• We didn’t always use the full hour and sometimes 30mins was enough
• Some people joined often, other weren’t able to join at all

• Purpose of board and staff relationship (how board is supporting org) should define boundaries 
• Division of labor to support board is arbitrary and flexible
• Most important clarification is the vision of how the board supports the staff

• Natalie and Monica have a meeting with Mark to discuss questions.
• Review list of Susan’s responsibilities for the Board – what do we want to keep doing? Stop doing? Do less of?

• What is the purpose of this board 4.0?
• What is the minimum amount of time the staff needs to put in so that the board can support this purpose?

Requires us to be flexible and meet people where they are at given circumstances (COVID-19).

Always have an action plan! Jon, Thomas and Christopher were planning meeting with Core Leaders as part of regular DNA meeting, reflection there was that this is ongoing work. 

Work over the next days, weeks and months to be able to test out roles. 

We’re moving to even more distributed leadership.

People agreed to take on more tasks in coming month, 6 weeks. Want to get to MVP and then we’ll get it out there and test drive.

• Conversations were postponed due to urgent organizing and murder of George Floyd. Data conversations are important but not urgent, like a fractal of what organizers might feel. 
• Lisa is going to rethink the questions for these conversations. Will focus on less technical and more relational questions. Less tactical and more strategic approach to the conversations. 
• People know the right answers (sunday school)  to the tactical questions but that doesn’t correspond or match up to experiential knowing. 
• Important to acknowledge that data has been used historically and systemically to further racial oppression and is predominately used by white data strategists to make decisions that POC often have to carry out. This acknowledgement could open deeper conversation.

• Realizing why I feel like an imposter at times or not the right person for this role is because I feel like I have to be everything for everyone.  (eg. cheerleader, raise payroll, etc)
• I have a perspective worthy of sharing. My past struggles make me a stronger leader and allow me to offer my experience to staff struggling with similar issues. 
• My body knows what I need, eg. shifted from doing tai ji to volleyball workout.

Keep practicing on a fractal scale: self, team, members, organization, community, world.

How am I reinforcing and practicing that show self love and self care towards liberation?

Paused and pivoted due to COVID-19. See next iteration for pivot.

Conduct another iteration of this experiment.

• Aligning around a definition of governance wasn’t hard
• People have problems with the word governance because the governance systems we grew up in are oppressive and we want to reclaim the word governance.
• Power and relationships are central to governance

Our next experiment should get us out of cerebral ways of knowing/language.

What can we learn about governance that exists beyond our experience in governance systems – e.g., from nature?

Learned about practice necessary to have successful outside facilitation

The old heads struggle in a space in which convo is very different than used to and many people couldn’t find the value of this different way of looking at it. 

Younger WOC want to lead with their hearts and their minds and find power in leading that way and appreciated deeply the space.

Having follow-up conversation with people. 

Dig deeper with the hearts and minds people.

• There is muscle memory in community building!
• Looking at time from a place of abundance and seeing it as the resource it is  
  • Focusing on the little practices, they accumulate
• Community, creativity, joy, collective 
• Small changes holding a set of values = big changes eventually

Bring learnings back to board to see what is next…

Learning community is a space where we can say “ this is how it is hard and how we can at least acknowledge it.”

Habit of being used to chaos and high highs and low lows so was disappointed that there wasn’t something more profound and in reflection, leaning into ok to be even.  Not expect closure and light bulbs for everyone. 

Board was inquisitive and not everyone agreed about this movement habit and the impact/importance. 

They were able to practice not being in agreement and valuing different viewpoint.

Board was able to hold learning space that Mary set up. Another board member led the discussion, a necessary step in shared leadership.  Mary felt relief from this shared leadership.

We have to move up to grapple with movement issues, for example  people erasing each other’ s work and not apologizing and learning lessons in silence and isolation because that is what is safest-  thinking that it is an issue of performance. So in movement work we aren’t pushing it. Living into democracy is about being truthful, not a rubber stamp that isn’t true democracy. Good to have those harder real issues and bring them to the table.

Committed to finding ways board members can lead sections of board meetings.

How might other people on the board and/or staff continue to learn publicly with me?

• More lessons were learned but not recorded by this experiment team. 
• We hope to share them here for you in the future.

1st month – be a critical thinker about purpose and outcomes and then think very opening about how to get there 

 

Grounding/Anchoring conversation in recent experience of strikes and taking people out from there into two generations in.

Keep putting out the next steps, even if not sure on all the steps, and trusting that the answers will come. It doesn’t have to all be figured out.  

1st month – be a critical thinker about purpose and outcomes and then think very opening about how to get there 

Grounding/Anchoring conversation in recent experience of strikes and taking people out from there into two generations in.

Keep putting out the next steps, even if not sure on all the steps, and trusting that the answers will come. It doesn’t have to all be figured out.  

this initial idea morphed into the experiment on networked governance, led by Trish and Natalie

See decision

We did not do this experiment because it was similar to another proposed, so we just went with updated design.

See decision

We did not do this experiment because it was similar to another proposed, so we just went with updated design

• In order to define governance we also felt like we needed to define power. 
• We seemed to coalesce around some definitions of power and governance that were helpful.  “Power is the ability to achieve purpose.”
• Finding simplicity that can allow for a more adept navigation of complexity
• I’d like to see what we do with some of the synthesis we did today in other experiments
• Taking the time to define does not limit the experimental nature of an experiment.  It can create parameters that we need in order to think bigger.
• “Governance is the set of systems we set up to live out our values.”

 

 

It seems like we could shape definitions of governance and power to carry forward.  Not exactly decisions, but movement toward more synthesis, and possibly another experiment. 

1. If we are honing in on governance as a form of ethical or purposeful power, when do we use “power” to mean “ability” (e.g. in our governance experiment we might want group X to be able to do Y/have ability Z) and when do we use it to mean a “relationship” (we want group X to make a decision that used to be made by Y) and is it important to have the same understanding about this.
2. Do we have a sense of an integrity of concept around governance, or are folks questioning the basic definitions of governance?
3. I don’t think we ever quite got to the question of harm which I think was sort of the impetus for setting up this experiment originally – ID’ing the role of governance and governing bodies in addressing harm.

• Symptom of the transition that we are in, one foot is in capitalism, other foot is searching for what’s next, in so many ways, we are so deeply connected from money system, whether it’s buying things from worker coop, buying from credit union, but all things are still part of system
• Decisions made from scarcity not abundance mindset
• What’s possible if decisions are proportionally made by those most impacted by the decisions
• It is about culture change, not just systems change
• What are the small changes that start to get us across the bridge to a new model
  • Includes mindset shifts

We will start a new experiment where each commit to one example of how we have taken one step to build community and one way to slow down, whether its money, activity, etc DO something that’s sticky around this time of the year. Victoria says she’s not doing Xmas cards & instead doing phone calls to build community.

What is the imagination learning we could lean into in addition to learning from others?

I shared that I made a mistake because was fearful and then lost the opportunity to create a process as a way to model what democracy could look like at this organization, with staff, with C3, wC4 board. This significantly shifted the energy and possibilities with the board.  

I with the Team of 4 is NOW creating conditions to shift the thought process about how we build a more equitable board.

— there is space to do this in the C4 board too. (originally was only thinking about C3 board) and C4 needs it too.

No one wanted to do the experiment!

For lots of reasons ,including:

• People feel like leaning into feeling might be too much of a stretch to use emotion as data
• People feel like talking about harm places burden on people of color
• There are juicier questions 
• Is this really practical??

• Can’t talk about harm without trust
• Rooting in emotions tends to unfairly burden POC – having to rehash the emotional impact doesn’t have the sort of impact that makes it worth it; anything when you’re centering emotion requires a certain degree of trust and i don’t know if this is the right context; of course we’re going to ground in some experience of the past and this is new

What we want to do first is define governance

1. What do we mean by governance?
2. What would it take to build trust to actually share personal stories around harm in governance with each other?

Long Arc isn’t only strategy or external exercise, we need to anchor it in who we are, our people, our communities. The starting point of us in the work and us as POC.  Leading with heart and not leaving it out the conversation is essential.

 Conversation and dynamics were shaped by who is in the room. 

Thinking 7 generations in the future is a practice that we aren’t practiced at. An open convo at dinner that goes into future convo is hard. Next time want to name that and affirm the need for when there isn’t enough space to talk about present condition, how important it is to have that.

Continue with two more dinners, each with the same people possibly in Oct/Nov. 

Plan for 1.5 day gathering in December that feels different and creates space for future dreaming.

Is there  a light touch way I could have guided focus back to long arc?  Eg. Prepped questions ready to redirect it or throw in the mix?

 

How can I connect the present and future in gatherings?

Can we take the first conversation and realities of what it is like for each of us in this work and keep pushing forward to imagine the long arc despite how uncomfortable it is?

• We created a powerpoint and shared it. 
• More lessons were learned but not recorded by this experiment team.

Outcome desired was authentic conversations where each member felt ownership of a piece but that not everyone needed to redesign every aspect of it. (How do people own pieces of this without having to hold all of it, smarter with our time and energy)

That at Washington CAN acknowledging that this practice is essential. Assigning and assessing if this is related to current skill set and needed or something most challenged by or a role that we need filled AND ensuring equitable distribution over time between people.

This is what I said I wanted to do and giving grace for the time. 

Recognizing this is the time for letting other people lead it rather than me solo and to create a process and end goals together means that it has to slow down and can’t be me designing

If democracy is lived out then I do it at every opportunity. Not have people just give feedback and agree with me. Maybe what we learn is that they want drafts but I’d rather skew on the side of not designing it myself and slowing down is ok. 

Because we want to learn what is the best way to operate the best way on shifting decision making at the organization. And the time is necessary, for developing board members to come from a place of power and know that these people wlll invest this power differently and know that they are leading it rather than implementing someone else’s vision. 

How is Data Being Shared?

The space is carved out in all of our board meetings to talk about this data. What are the ?s we want to ask of the leadership council and how are we reading them together so we can design a process where 

How to facilitation convo about data and analysis?

With funder want to be disciplined with how we are we using the data. 

Wrapping up is pulling in learning from data from LC conversations

This experiment can be parallel with the other new base lab experiment.

• Do I start the conversations with the next board members from where Jack and I left off or do I replicate the conversation with all of them. Then how do we reconcile the questions if we want to keep it simple.  
• Facilitate where guidance and not rubber stamp what Jack said.

Surprised at how effective this experiment framework was. The steps to identify the how might we question and develop a concrete design enabled me to identify the places to pivot and  pause with a precise lens for reflection. By letting the puzzle pieces sit, I was able to bring them together at the right time.

 

It is valuable to ask and pursue questions when you have no idea what the answer might be. I have this idea and I don’t know what the questions are yet.  The support to be able to do that through the process was important. 

 

It is so important to bring people along on the process and allow members and those invested to influence you and change your mind.

We are moving to work to launch a “Build Team” a group of people from staff, leaders, board members and sustaining members not officially affiliated. This team over  3-6 months plans to explore the questions that arose from the empathy interviews. In service of the larger question: what it would look like to have a membership core team and what space does it occupy in the organization?

For example is it a place where we are assigning specific mass and deep base that might be a support for all of the core teams?

As develop organizational experience of co-governing internally, how will the membership core team work with that?

1. From the experiment process, recognizing how much a lift even a small experiment is. The coordination and systems necessary to do this experiment is big.  Got insight into what it takes and how we can work together to make it happen.
2. Found that most of our folks are vote by mail which is not something we knew before. This will inform our information and messaging that we send to people about voting.
3. Age brackets, our email list is younger than our cell phone list. This challenged our assumptions, one new theory is that young voters don’t want to be contacted on their cell phones and may give a burner email.
4. We now have baseline assessment of who our people are. Excited to use that to build, could be a basis for other experiments like asking them to do an action.

Not yet, considering it when planning our next voter contact program. This data will inform that thinking.

How might we best leverage this data?

• Language, asks, etc. How do we take these learnings into the next steps.

 

How might we share this information in the organization as they work on planning?

• There’s a lot for staff to learn about finances – folks found the video interesting/informative
• Staff can offer support in helping us think about better aligning our business model with our values
• Susan is holding a lot of the anxiety related to the business model and playing a buffering role

We want to think about what a business model in alignment with our values might look like.

• If we came from our values, what would our model look like? 
• What are the specific tensions between values and economics?
• What are the choice points and how might we develop a financial system that supports our values?
• Is there a different way to hold finances so it’s not such a heavy burden on one person?

We started out very ambitious and the amount of prep that was needed around the data analysis to get the most out of the experiment was more.

 

If we don’t match the data first then our results will suffer and we won’t be able to develop the shared learning. We want to be able to find out that people who opted into our email and are down with us on one or two issues are more likely to respond.  Rather than simply saying x% are with us. This will help give us more a 360 view of who CA Calls voter is.

Pause experiment and focus on data matching first.

This experiment has been closed. A version was carried out and we’re awaiting details.

Throw more spaghetti at the wall digitally. 

Relatively low lift to put events up and test ways to boost engagement, in this case we did it by video and focus on locales. 

 

Being in personal proximity to organizer with digital folks has helped to cross departmental collaboration, much can be lost over email. 

 

Communication between departments is key, started a habit of checking in every two weeks across Digital and Organizing. Taking time for reflection and what is learned and problem solve together.

Considering expanding this through the BaseLab Process

What are the conditions that allow for quick engagement?  One thing to get in contact but what facilitates people in the door and how do they stay for the long haul. 

 

How might we scale this? 

 

Would this work again or was this group a stacked deck? (It was monolingual Spanish)

• Organizationally we are trying to move policy and go directly to elected leadership to win. We’ve never been surfacing the monied interests that are also pulling at those politicians and winning 10x more than we ever do. Clear in Houston where we did a lot of work to get Mayor elected and haven’t gotten much out of it.
• Houston – no zoning, wild west market when it comes to housing, development and gentrification. Our ability to win has been limited because we haven’t had the right strategic analysis of how decisions are getting made. If we can do that, we will have robust campaigns with real target to organize better, more aggressively.
• We haven’t done the fundamental research to understand who’s holding the power and the pull-strings.
• Unearthing what is really happening behind the scenes in this policy making.
• Houston campaign around housing and recovery: there’s a mayoral election in Fall 2019. We’re trying to figure out who’s controlling development and real estate in the city and county.

• Practices that change people’s comfortability.
• • • Workers have stock ownership – set up expectation that as work you own part of the value.
• Wanting some support space to identify what are good demands to advance our campaign towards changing the frame and narrative around public good?
• A lot of us are in campaign whether its land issues, CBA fights. There’s often the challenge – same demands that can come up over and over. How do we look at them more critically? Do we need to add pieces to it? How do we shift the debate around public good?

Our experiment was a success because

• Wendy’s leadership, confidence and urgency, the latter prompted by the timing in relationship to strategy decisions at Family Values at Work., helped the project gain momentum and other participants move forward despite fears. 
• People were willing to do the work in between meetings and across organizations. 
•  Experimentation gives us opportunity to try out and doesn’t need to be everything to everyone. 

Through our Meshworks Webinar we learned

• Not everyone understood all the words and jargon.  Next time want to sending out a primer, when we say authoritarianism and neoliberalism what do we mean.
•  Feels daunting to relate to experience in US and outside the US and profound danger and enormity feels like a barrier that webinar to bridge but then couldn’t get into convo for common experience. 
• People are hungry to connect across organizations and this connection can be grounded in the lived experience influenced by the global rise of authoritarianism.

Want to do another series of calls across organization with more time in breakout groups for discussion and relationship building.  Spend more time thinking about who is going to be with whom in the breakout groups, helpful to create greater discussion.

Will improve integration of Spanish speakers.

How do you have all of the people talk about deep political issues and bring everyone along?

• By laws.
• Recruitment issues.
• Mitigating power dynamics.
• Structure.

Two big lessons learned:

• Slowing down process and being the bridge.
• Needing to bring along the board with the transition – also something about a name, shape, container for transition so that others can hold it with you.
• Slow down the process is the role I am supposed to play at this org for, this includes work with the board. Will be able to bridge old identity and what we will become as an organization. 

Suggestion: Mary think about next step in experiment. Could be about ally person or naming this process and identifying what’s the container.

I will find the right messenger for the board. Take time to figure out who might be the right messenger.

• This experiment didn’t link directly into any of our work so although we all agreed it was important there was little traction and a lack of focused leadership for this cross movement discussion. 
• Next time we’d focus more on linking this into someone’s work as an anchor.

• Two videos were produced through a partnership between 350.org and Network for Labor and Sustainability. 
• See one video here:
  • https://www.facebook.com/labor4sustainability/videos/363267437637217/
• Ongoing communication between Natalia and Michael created more touch-points for connection, such as having 350.org staff at Network for Labor and Sustainability’s annual convergence.  Since this collaborations between the orgs have continued.

We don’t know what the outcomes of lessons learned were at this time. We hope to share in the future. 

In the meantime checkout the awesome work of Jobs with Justice here: https://www.jwj.org/

• Talking to people of color at the door about abortion is powerful. And a little scary,  even to staff. Our movement is not adequately prepared to lead on abortion.
• Canvassers found this canvass to be deeply impactful on them. Canvassers were moved by participating in the test with us and want to do more of this.
• Finding our own personal connection to abortion and then sharing it is hard. Telling this story night after night will have an impact – Forward Together needs to prepare for this impact on our paid canvassers.

We will be using the Deep Canvass script as our model, but infusing more of FT’s values and framing as an Reproductive Justice org.

We only had one male identified canvasser. What is it like to have male identified folks talk to women and/or men?   

• • Could we draw the turf so that women talk to women and men talk to men or women? 
  • Is there a difference that happens across genders? 
    • This will impact who we hire.
      • Assumption is that canvas will be at least 50% male because that is norm for canvassers.   
      • Role plays in the interview process. 
      • Might go through multiple rounds of convos.

We want content that helps people explore and expand their understanding of the systemic nature of the crisis we are in (economic, social) – systemic roots of oppression and exploitation in how it shapes strategy and tactics. Second layer is how to develop strategy and tactics and what is the difference?  Systemic nature guides strategy and strategy guides tactics. 

 

We found out that there is a mapping project around political education by Grassroots Policy Project. 

 

We crafted a list of political educators across sectors that we want to talk with.

Regroup at next in person network meeting.

By going outside and walking, staff were able to untether themselves from their computers for a portion of our staff meeting and really looked forward to and savored the time.

It is unclear if the quality of presence increased.

Despite technical issues and different understandings of if we were walking, the majority of present staff walked.

If you join zoom via phone and computer, only mute yourself on phone if you’ll be away from your computer.

What shift towards collective inner work and connection with land would occur if we instituted the habit of walking for a 15 minute checkin as the norm for the second staff meeting of the month?

By going outside and walking, staff were able to untether themselves from their computers for a portion of our staff meeting and really looked forward to and savored the time. 

It is unclear if the quality of presence increased.

Despite technical issues and different understandings of if we were walking, the majority of present staff walked. 

If you join zoom via phone and computer, only mute yourself on phone if you’ll be away from your computer.

Alison continued to try to implement this when possible in her own meetings, especially when only with one other person. This included some internal calls and supervision time.

What shift towards collective inner work and connection with land would occur if we instituted the habit of walking for a 15 minute checkin as the norm for the second staff meeting of the month?

• Doing mini projects with other managers is a great way to do work to ease the tension of moving projects.
• A big piece of capacity work is in how we design work plans; in order to alleviate capacity issues, creating clear roles and tasks help teams work around those issues.
• The experiment gave clear goals and expectations because there was a clear work plan, calls and regular assessment.
• The success of this experiment shows that experiments can be directly connected to current priority work.

Utilize the template with complex work to work with different managers where equity feels like a more urgent imperative.

 

Also replicate the small size projects with others.

Could you have people at the equity meeting have their first step and give specific support to those feeling more urgent?

 

Don’t want to conflate creating the equity plan (umbrella) with the specific work plan concrete times.

There wasn’t shared momentum around this small step to compare, so no one moved anything forward.

Momentum is present around the question of “How might we create a cohort of political education facilitators across movements that would help us develop an approach?” and the assumption that there isn’t a network now and that conversation could yield mutually beneficial outcomes.

When an Outlook user receives a google invite, the options are: accept, decline, tentative. A Decline of this invite was sent to (my) Google calendar just fine.

On recurring invitations, when clicking Accept to an invite, the Outlook user (Smiley) is taken to Google Calendar, but won’t save to Outlook. *This is a problem with integration.*

When Google calendar invites are sent to an Outlook user, they must RSVP in 2 ways: Accept/Decline/Tentative at the top so that it adds to their Outlook calendar. And then, they must also click on Yes/No/Maybe inside the calendar invite to add it to the Google user’s calendar. *This is not very efficient and may be contributing to the problem*

Julia needs to look at alternative ways to make sure that calendar invites show up on both Outlook and Google calendars.

What alternative methods allow for integration of Outlook and Google calendar?

Who else is using Outlook that I can continue to test this with?

 

 

• Learnings is around non violent communication, all directors feel like they need to increase their skill in this during this transition.
• We need more time with one another. We adjusted time with directors – increasing our frequency of meeting to biweekly – so that we have more contact with one another. 
• Directors needed a reminder to include “internal work” as the real work. The idea to reserve 30% for internal work was an eye-opener for many of them.
• Directors need a space to step into leadership. Team Directors held the “mama bears” space for the team and now we are re-shifting this space for all the directors to step into their leadership and become grown-ass wolves. 
• It’s hard for people to say no – but we need to continue to give them tools to do so. These discussions on pacing take a lot of time as people are invested in the work and it also requires that they not only think about their own work but the work of others.
• We need to build our collective capacity to do this more often and with more ease. 

• Consistent facilitation of Director team meetings creates much clearer sense for other directors about the organizational priority and focus on this transition.
• We changed the transition time to be from now until elections. 
• Focus of transition became civic engagement and our electoral work  – dropping or postponing everything else. 

• Starting with listening brought insights to us. 
• Stability, independence and family values were some of the themes. 

• Network council members are invested in the cohort program.
• If we ask them to make time to support it they will do it.
• Important to invest everyone in the experiment and understand how it is moving our strategy forward.
• Need to be careful in experiment design, to test things in stages that build upon each other.

To involve NC members in recruiting process, 4 people volunteered!

To do an initial test recruitment call without a Network Council first to make sure we have optimized for the calls we bring on NC members.

How to incorporate experimentation lens/practices into our ongoing work in a way that is not too onerous for our limited capacity.

 

Yes we will do another interation, in the sense that this is part of a larger pilot project and we are building upon it. The final metrics will be in the quality of recruits to the program and the ongoing engagement with Network Council groups.

In responding to partner’s immediate needs, shifted to focus on electoral fundraising coaching.

Will continue to visit partner before the election and partner has specifically reached out and brought up that they would like to discuss co-governance with Mehrdad demonstrating that this is an area they want coaching on.

In the meeting itself, everyone participated fully–both in the discussion and the note-taking.  After various prompts, energy was high. All approved the team charter. And in addition to the planned assignment, one additional experiment came out of it organically from the development department rep.

Forward Together pivoted quickly to adapt this experiment to serve their needs, see the next iteration.

With an internal transition, a new iteration and hypothesis was developed.

Optimizing our calls is useful but it revealed some different expectations and needs that different staff in the department have from the call. Thus “improved” was not necessarily a shared experience. It became an opportunity to assess how some of these different expectations around calls might be symptoms of issues in how our teams are structured.

 

Success of calls is also dependent on linking with other organizational comms/collaboration systems: emailing out weekly priorities, using slack etc.

 

The balance between transparency and capacity is a juggling act. More transparency takes more capacity and the department needs to be intentional about how we balance those two poles.

Creation of “afterparty” final agenda section where people can self select was successful. This was generative rather than bureaucratic.

The effort to create more focus on criteria and agenda proposal systems did not create more engagement. It just created another systems to be maintained that few people used so we discontinued it.

Doing broader assessment of department structure and workflow systems to see where we can optimize.

 

Will not continue more robust agenda proposal systems since they didn’t improve the call and required staff time to maintain.

 

Adopted most of the #9 proposals since they were helpful.

What is an improved call experience?

We will continue to evaluate the calls and ongoing collaboration systems to make sure they are serving our goals.

Everyone does Big Picture Monday in their own way and have noticed that people have really cool auto replies that explain what spacious Monday’s are – inviting people to wait for a reply unless urgent. In this way we’re touching other people outside as well as inside the org with a bit of spaciousness.

Spacious Big Picture Monday’s are continuing. 

How is this practice being modeled from the top?

Important to bring people along so they see themselves in the big changes we’re trying to make.  Announcements re other transitions were accepted without as much of the expected push-back in part I think because of the level at which we included the MTeam in discussions on paradigm shifts

Membership Lab Created

Staffing positions and work plans getting adjusted to reflect updated priorities

What are we going to be able to let go of, and when to improve our chances of success?

• CSS’ story-telling approach aligns with JWJs goals
• CJAs “Our Power Communities” may be a good model for JWJ club structure

Moving conversation between CSS and full worker revival team to craft experiment for Kansas City gathering May 10-12.

Will applying CSS framework allow us to get from the MO gathering to starting 1-2 clubs in Missouri?

Learnings:

1. Having something informal, not prepped is still really valuable even without a ton of prep. Bias to action towards sharing is valuable. 
2. Making + following through on commitment to share is easy to push aside but when prioritized we can make the most of it, go for it.
3. Some people were moved and really enjoyed the shared learning, others wondered to what end.

1. How might we bring a learning stance without a direct agenda for how it will influence us directly into Change Elemental?   – make this an explicit understanding and consider what this means for learning and practice team. (breadth and curiosity to explore; developing a trust in emergence and how insights from one area can lead to unplanned results somewhere else.)
2. How might we support others to be in this practice of recording their learning from PD and community of practice experiences for org wid learning, meaning-making, proactive advancement/evolution?
3. How might we weave across videos so that we are connecting learning and layering it (both across individuals and all the videos) in this experiment and across experiments?

• A tool like this could be incredibly useful as we are more and more working across projects. Natasha is managing three projects that are all team and all are in different places – Reached the breaking point that want to use this for teams. 
• Hopeful to get out of cycle of questions and recognition of this not a one person. 
• Question differentiation – what is necessary for a decision versus what are implementation.
• Baseline commitment is necessary to support admin/operations/consulting and that it is ok if people don’t geek out on it.  This makes it seem more manageable 
• I think that the acknowledgement that MAG staff will always have more questions and that is OK. We can still move forward with decisions.

Aja to communicate with Susan about our next steps, Feb 14, 2018

Can you eat a salad of Wrike rather than a big meal?  (eg the baseline commitment)

My conclusion from this is that the current time projections sheet MAG uses is really comprehensive and easy to use.

 

With technical support and input time, we could probably set something up that uses “anticipated hours” and puts them into another report, but it is unclear if this would be able to give us the level of detail and context that the current projections spreadsheet provides. This anticipated hours would shift if we shifted the project timeline.

If we move forward with Wrike, technical support as we set it up will be essential.

How do other organizations/consulting firms manage their time projections (eg. Groupaya, Netcentrics Campaigns, etc)?

• Both teams got a sense of individuals preferences for finding items, diggers (people who follow folders hierarchy) and searchers (people who search for files and documents).
• Susan learned it was easier to transfer files from google drive to Box that she expected. 
• Some people use Box Edit to directly edit Box files without needing to use Box Sync, therefore avoiding storing all the Box files on their computer. 
• Old internal files relating to finance, communications, marketing may have outdated references. 
• Some people have lots of files on their own drive or on their personal computers while others have none. Coaching and supervision files need to be kept separately, this could be by keeping on your own google drive. 
• There is general will to improve and understand our filing system among staff. 
• Teaching people best practices for search on Box and Google may solve many people’s issues with finding files.

Draft/Junk folders on Box should be deleted, these easily clutter searches.

Leaders do have articulated theories of change for their organization in a variety of formats, a publication, on their website, as an internal document.

We can now integrate these strategies/theory of changes into our power building synthesis.

Should we have asked someone other than our North Star participants for their strategy/TOC?  (eg. other staff members at the organization)

 

Do people have strategy/TOC that they don’t want to share? (eg. we didn’t get strategies/TOC from all orgs)

• Easier to find content than I thought it would be
• Retweeting was harder (we had thought it would be easier — hard to figure out what to lift up and why)
• Reviewing our MAG feed provided a broad connection to what is happening in the field, could be really helpful to use hootsuite to sort our our feeds and get specific views. (ex for fields we want to reach re: expanding social justice ecosystem)

Elissa has asked us to keep tweeting until Natasha, the communication director comes back.

• What is appropriate to retweet? Are there certain partnerships or clients that we want to specifically lift up?
• How do the 5 elements influence how we tweet?
• Could we use a Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to time tweets?

• Our leaders were quick to join, exceeding our expectations.
• Of the seven leaders who have joined, only one (Jenny) has posted.
• We haven’t heard any word of any difficulties.

We didn’t learn much, other than how relatively painless it was to get people onto the tool. The next (and harder) step will be to see how and whether folks will engage, and whether they’ll find this space useful.

Do a followup experiment testing people’s engagement.

• People were appreciative of the space.  I’m not sure if we would meet again – there seemed to be openness and a couple of people mentioned that they would like to.
• The personal invitations resulted in a great number and quality of bringing new people in. 10 people showed up in total (6 known from other circles and 4 new people).
  • 14 people said they were interested
  • 10 people showed up
  • another 12 people responded but couldn’t make the date

Waiting on email chain responses to see if there will be another gathering.

• Opening to emergence and creating space for co-creation is essential. 
• To live into our multiple ways of knowing, we can’t do business as usual in the non-profit world. 
• Being together in person is powerful and video chats can be moving.

We are trying to gather as a group on December 15 in the Bay Area.

• Part of the reason this experiment failed was because it was too broad and not directive enough. 
• It wasn’t clear whether the purpose was to replace our emails with slack or use it as a tool for different types of communication. The experiment lacked a hypothesis :(. 
• People are open to using Slack and trying it with another specific purpose including Announcements/Status Updates on external events people are attending/presenting at; Communications around proposals/reports that are collaborative and generate a lot of back and forth email.

No decisions made.

Could Slack work for project updates that aren’t urgent? 

I only ended up testing with one solicited Recommend. Views and engagement definitely went up significantly. I got no click-throughs to my website that I know if.

I suspect that Medium does have more potential for virality then my blog, but I would have to put more effort into sharing it up-front. Not sure I want to publicize Medium over my blog (which increases the visibility of my website and the potential for folks to see other links there) or that my social media feed has enough traffic to justify publicizing both links.

I’m going to stop posting to Medium for now. I don’t see any immediate low-overhead benefits, and I’m not wanting to invest in longer-term benefits there for now.

More people followed my videos than I expected, including some people who are following my YouTube channel. I put in almost no effort in publicizing, so it was a good reminder that I do have an audience, and even leaving lazy trails can be valuable. Nobody was inspired to share their own video takeaways, although people did respond to the content of some of the videos. My biggest takeaway was a bit of a surprise. I always thought my sharing muscle is strong. It's not. It's toned, but it could use more maintenance to stay strong. Experiment with other ways to share more aggressively as a way to build my sharing muscle.

How obtrusive was it?

Surprisingly unobtrusive. For the most part, I forgot about it. I forgot it going through security at the airport, I forgot to take it off my pants. Apparently, it’s washing machine proof, which is good, because I could easily see me mistakenly putting it in the wash.

For some reason, it was a bit obtrusive with one particular pair of shorts, but not overly so, and I’m sure I could have adjusted it.

How easy was it to use?

Very. Didn’t have any connection issues, battery life is great, charging is easy, app is more or less straightforward.

What did you learn?

• When I’m talking to folks, my breathing tends to be tense
• When I’m on my computer or phone, my breathing tends to be focused
• I am incredibly sedentary in my day-to-day
• The vibrating feature is great, because I have greater self-awareness about my tense breathing, which enables me to make adjustments
• I can definitely see myself using this for self-care experiments. I’d like to do some longer-term tracking to see if I can detect / validate patterns, then start setting some targets based on that.
• I’m not sure yet whether or not this might be useful for my original intention, which is to provide real-time data for meeting facilitation, but it’s still worth experimenting

Do a followup experiment where I track more data and analyze for patterns. Potentially build a dashboard as part of this.

Do a followup experiment with one other person where we compare our data and analyze for patterns.

Eventually do a followup experiment where we start using these more intentionally for meetings.

Technically, we hit minimum success. However:

• We ran into technical roadblocks that made it hard
• The email notifications helped some of us
• Even if we hadn’t, once a week for two weeks isn’t long enough to establish a habit

• Make sure everyone has resolved their technical problems. (Already resolved for 2/3 people.)
• Instead of repeating the Kardashians experiment, Eugene wants to do a “The Martian” experiment (which someone had proposed as the original name for this experiment), where he does a video wrap-up of what he’s thinking about once a day for five days. Wants to see if others are inspired to do the same (or at least to share their thinking) without pre-committing to an experiment.

We have not yet tested a version of this experiment where we broadcast videos publicly (or at least with a larger audience). Something to think about for a future iteration.

• Simply having the group accountability made me more self-aware about what I was saying, including other fillers I often use
• I also became much more aware of when others used fillers
• Light, fun feedback really helped, and it also helped lighten the meeting overall. Mark’s virtual feedback and celebratory sign especially made me laugh
• Slowing down my speech was the most effective way for me to avoid using fillers, and I think it makes me a more effective speaker / communicator overall

I want to make reducing my filler usage an overall priority. Replicate this experiment as often as possible — it’s light, and I can do it in both professional and personal situations.

There’s NO good reason to not take the time to meditate every day.  My whole week and felt sense of things being OK was palpable. Documentation during first part of week increased my sense of commitment and focus on this experiment for later part of the week even though documentation fell off some.

I will build calendar/e-mail reminders and live link to documentation into future experiments.

I don’t think I’ll do another iteration — seems fairly self-generating at least for now.  Might shift to an experiment to increase daily exercise — which I’ve been doing poorly at despite it being a Whole Life Challenge commitment for which I regularly lose points for non-performance!  How to take micro-level personal experiments and translate to org’l/movement context?

How might I increase even further my follow-through on documentation? (Imp’t. Because I think documentation is a key to greater follow-through, at least for me.)

Trust my practice not my feelings.

Writing down a reminder of the things I can do and having it on my altar to remind me.

When I have my practice, I was craving less caffeine.

Had familiar learnings before yet don’t always apply them.

List on my altar of things that are good for me.

Take list with me when I’m headed on the road.

Is there some way I can send myself a daily reminder to fill out the documentation? (eg get a calendar invite to send an alert with the link to the design document, that gets delivered when I’m online, mid day- as a .)

Finished on-time after 10 weeks. Ended up cutting a project (for content not timing reasons) and also skipping a week, but it all worked out.

For the People, I needed to up my allocations to three hours a week, and in reality, it took longer, because I found myself thinking a lot about these folks throughout the week and jotting down notes so I wouldn’t forget. The main reason it took so long, however, was that I felt the need to include more narrative and context so that others could understand the piece. This may have felt of greater importance, because I wanted to let my peers read my descriptions of themselves.

I decided to just go with bullet points with my Projects, and I was easily able to finish the work in an hour a week.

The approach made it doable in bite-sized chunks, and it resulted in principles grounded in experience, which raised my confidence in them. I’ve been wanting to do this for several years, with several false starts, but this is the first time I actually finished the work to my satisfaction!

It was relatively easy to pull together a set of draft principles after completing 10-weeks of free capture and engagement. I simply aggregated all the lessons, clustered, and pruned. I then did another iteration where I cross-referenced the work with previous attempts to pull together principles, and settled on five high-level principles.

I posted links to my descriptions on Loomio, then shared links to Loomio on the E3 WhatsApp group (five people) and on my Colearning Slack (seven people, not counting three also on WhatsApp). In a few cases, I emailed links to specific people.

As far as I could tell from limited and (in some cases) indirect feedback, everybody in E3 read at least some of the posts. Both Jodie and Alison said that reading these helped them understand the approach I was taking to our STP work together.

I heard from nine people overall. Most of the feedback was a simple acknowledgement, but some of the feedback surprised me in their depth. The feedback didn’t end up helping me pull together the principles, but they did deepen relationships and other people’s understanding of me and my approach. It was a nice win, although because the People write-ups ended up taking three times as long, it didn’t come for free.

Test the draft principles on as many practitioners as possible, both colleagues and people who barely know me. Iterate.

Incomplete / stalled

adrienne did not formally collect this data. The structure of experiment templates doesn’t fit with adrienne’s modality of work. This process feels difficult to participate in as it is not part of formal paid work.

Emergence needs feedback loops but/and hard to structure for it.

Some people need a lot of data, but this doesn’t align in situations of quick emergence.

How do we support people in emergence, moving through values alignment, emotional landscape, etc?

How do we build embodied trust in emergent processes?

We tried out working in a culture of abundance rather than scarcity, walking the talk of collaboration over competition. And it worked!

Indicator of level of trust is a joint staff retreat so relationships are deepened.

Many things were validated.

• Can communicate ideas visually without being a skilled artist (I do think visually). Visuals are good succinct  way of communicating ideas
• If I keep doing it, I’ll get better
• Surprise: Jodie printing out and framing pictures. Feels like kids’ parents putting up on fridge. Does that mean it helped the team?  If so how much?
• When exercise a sharing muscle it encourages you to do it even more

Try doing it for another 4 weeks and share it more broadly on Instagram or Twitter.

Try internal Miles River experiment, what would happen if we did it regularly

What could we do to assess the experiment more rigorously?

Automated google form email quiz

What happens when I’ve drawn all the principles?

HMW measure shared understanding in MilesRiver through doodles?

HMW build our synthesis muscles on MileRiver Team?

Giving a specific number of poems is irrelevant. It’s the impact that is relevant. That impact could come from one poem or 16 depending on the poem. Also, writing the poems is not just a function of making time. There is an internal process of arriving at that place that does not really have a relationship with linear time. Sometimes the poems appear quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. Other times the well feels bone dry, the field fallow even though we know there is momentum in stillness.

With the help of some words from Eugene, I’ve come to realize that importance of understanding what experimentation of this kind requires of us on a human level. I’m curious how we combine this way and depth of knowing with our more “photo-real” log-like sharing of what we are actually doing in our experiments.

• Being in a rigorous practice with support and accountability moves work. Give it resources if you want it to happen.
• So we give it more meaning and resources and that matters.
• Using an experiment frame helped give work between Jodie and Elissa (MAG and STP) more flexibility and space to explore what it could be without committing.
• Trust was built.

• STP not committing to be a main partner in spring of 2017 with MAG because of capacity, will lift it up to funders and STP will participate
• OD Network Development – there is interest but not a priority so on pause.
• Practice Sharing our learning. Start that with values based work.
• We should have funder talking points around each other’s work and spread these memes of how our work weaves.
• Move forward with another experiment around values based agenda.

Reminding people about tender transparency at beginning and end of calls was helpful. It was a breakthrough to realize that tender transparency didn’t mean that it was going public, rather we could share it with people we trust and so that people can learn and grown this work with us. Tender is that we want increase the space for learning, not cause drama. Because we had agreed at the beginning to make meeting notes tenderly transparent it made it easy for Elissa to share them, eg. we didn’t have to put in extra work to share about our meetings! Keep tender transparency going.

Using a shared messaging platform was unifying and accessible.

Having Alison to track the data was key.

Cell.y helped E3 members feel unified and connected.

Provided scaffolding for communication that we needed. Helpful to have thread and narrative all in one place and on our phones.

Allowed some mirroring and reflection that was in real time or much closer to real time than scanning across google docs on our computers less frequently. Liked that it was on phone, felt different that getting on computer.

The scaffolding and Alison as support in moving E3 along helped E3 group be more generative and say yes to trying more things.

E3 will move from using Celly to a WhatsApp group.

It feels pretty vulnerable to share like this but I’m committed to doing it and trust you all to not share these around. (Thanks!)

Thought that experiment might change the way he uses his diary but it did not. He trusted group either through personal experience or through other’s recommendation.

Late to start the experiment, yet successful in that there was response and he completed it mostly as he designed. This could be in part because of the time constraint, it was a one week experiment.

C+ = others read and reacted, intimate view

F = prompting macro level group learning

Verged on feeling like a to do and that was originally what she’d defined as failure.

Learned that she doesn’t have enough time. Needs time to do this, to feel abundant and a sense of possibility, to be creative.

Felt great saying I failed.

Intention of sharing helped bring thoughts together.

Started with the idea of fun with photography and ended up posting meeting pics. Didn’t yet check in via a pop quiz to see if people were paying attention. Will ask about caring.

Self Grade: F (w/scream face)

Enjoyed doing her experiment.

Reconcile murmuration and structure. Posted at the last minute, learned how to use soundcloud. Was a constant point of reflection. Feels fine with vulnerability ( Apple, Sauce, Poop and MAG).

Failed on sharing. Was aware of the group and process. Engaged with self and the intersections.

Alive with learning.

Toy with idea of opening to a followership with trust and common purpose as the core rather than belonging and control.

Feels like there isn’t time for unpaid play, when has down time needs to unwind.

More nudges for experiments

Didn’t see where and when experiments were happening.

Felt that people weren’t engaging or paying attention to her experiment.

Desires interaction and conversation.

Test didn’t work well, didn’t have measures defined in advance.

Prompted discovery and design of Cell/y experiment.

• Still in learning, but so far…
  • Our community wants to hear from us in theses moments
  • In chaos, we gain clarity on what is needed (e.g. a specific liberatory practice) and it is valuable to share that w/the field
  • These moments create potential for continued ripples of change.

• Let’s do more of this! 
• Requires mutual commitment.
• Allowed us to follow a through-line that brought forward learning. 
• Required one of us to jot down some notes when we returned to the computer.