Faster Than 20

12/18/2024

Next February, we're offering a new 12-week training: Power and Love for Managers. It's for managers of all levels, and it's focused on developing strong management muscles and habits, especially around navigating power. You must apply to participate, and the cohort will be limited to 12 folks. Application deadline is January 10, 2025, so don't wait to apply!

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. —Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here” (1967) Great management plays an outsized role in …

10/12/2022

San Francisco Bay Area folks, I'd really encourage you to go see the Beloved Economies co-authors and contributors speak at The Ruby in San Francisco next Thursday, October 20 at 6pm. Joanna and Jess have put together a fantastic book summarizing their research on how we might re-imagine and repair how we work together. (I'm honored to be in the book.) It will be a great opportunity to hear about some of the ways this work is manifesting in the world. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-conversation-about-reimagining-and-repairing-how-we-work-tickets-434213894447

01/13/2022

I had the pleasure of leading the good folks at through a journey mapping exercise last month, where they reflected on the highs and lows of the past two years. Taking time to reflect and celebrate is so important, and it's especially rich and valuable in a group setting.

06/17/2021

Many thanks to Aydin Mirzaee for the great conversation about building collaboration muscles and mindsets on Fellow.app's podcast!

In episode 54, Eugene Eric Kim tells us why we always need to be looking for our replacement and how impactful a person in power can truly be.

02/04/2021

Journey Mapping is an outstanding tool for quickly and collaboratively telling the story of a project's highs and lows over a bounded timeline. I not only use it with clients, for the past four years, I've used it in community as a way to make meaning of and celebrate the previous year. In my latest blog post, I share what came up for me in assessing my 2020 and also what might lie ahead. I also include a link to the toolkit so that you can use it with your groups.

Four years ago, I started organizing a small end-of-year gathering with other Bay Area collaboration practitioners to celebrate and make meaning of the year together. We would spend the first few h…

11/12/2020

New blog post: What I’ve learned about building collaboration muscles over the past seven years.

It’s now been seven years since I first started exploring a simple hypothesis: Collaboration is a muscle (or, rather, a set of muscles) You strengthen these muscles by exercising them repeatedly (i…

07/24/2020

It's easier to have "more" as a goal than it is to specify "how much." But it's not just terrible strategically, it can have harmful consequences to your team.

When I was in my early 20s, I used to play pickup basketball with a guy who was 20 years older than me, but didn’t look it. He was in superb shape, and he never seemed to get injured. At one of our…

07/13/2020

A little time lapse of me drawing a title page for my latest toolkit. I've been prototyping a visioning toolkit for changemakers and collaboration practitioners for almost two years. I'm doing one more iteration and round of testing, and if all goes well, time to finally release! Let me know if you're interested in testing, and I can send you more details.

07/02/2020

From my latest blog post on George Floyd and this moment: "Human beings love simple, emotional narratives. We need to accept this about ourselves and leverage it to motivate change. But once we allow ourselves to be moved, we also have to be willing to let go of these simple, emotional narratives and dive more deeply into the messy and far less compelling nuts and bolts of the work. Real change takes lots of hard work, the kind that most people are completely uninterested in hearing about or doing."

It’s been one month since a white police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, a 46-year old Black father of five. I’ve found the subsequent response remarkable for its intensity, unprecede…

05/22/2020

Such a joy to see so many friends and colleagues at our collaboration practitioners meetup this past Wednesday. Many thanks to Jack Cohen for leading us through his wonderful exercises and thinking around goal framing, safe spaces, and growth mindset.

05/20/2020

Last year, Zoe Tamaki and I sat down in front of a camera to share lessons learned from a project we worked on together. http://fasterthan20.com/2020/05/case-study-designing-and-facilitating-a-small-nonprofit-board-retreat-with-zoe-tamaki/

05/05/2020

The point of strategic planning isn't to have a strategy, it's to act strategically. In this video (part of the Getting Better at Collaboration series), we explain what strategy is, how to develop GOOD strategy, and how to build strong muscles and habits for acting strategically.

For more, see: http://fasterthan20.com/framework/acting-strategically/