You want to fix something, change something, build something.

Maybe you’re in a big organization that you want to change, or about to launch your own startup. Either way you have a passion to Make Something Big Happen.

Much advice is directed at you as an individual – how to influence management, how to get venture capital, how to avoid venture capital, how to sell the benefits of your idea, etc. All of that advice may be great. But in my twenty years of watching and making things happen, there is one constant in every success I’ve observed.

At some point, if you’re going to reach scale, you need a partner.

Why is having a partner so crucial?

1. To keep your eyes on the prize. If what you are doing is truly new and extraordinary, you will face distraction and discouragement on your way to victory. Your co-conspirator will remind you why the Big Idea is so important. She will keep you focused when you’re distracted and motivated when your frustrated. And in doing the same for her, you’ll feed your own passion and commitment.
2. To save you from your blindspots. As brilliant and amazing as you are, you have blind spots. You’re great at enthusiasm but not the best at follow-up.  You’re fantastic at getting things done but not the best at selling the idea. We all have blindspots, but by definition it’s hard for us to see them in action. Your partner can tell you when to change your style or bring in a different skillset so that you get where you want to go.
3. To help you decide when to hold tight, & when to let go. The trickiest dilemma in making change is knowing when to be uncompromising and when to be flexible. Is it better to push back the ship date to get that one extra feature in? Should you keep a key creative happy by letting go of that one detail that maybe no one else will notice? Or should you do the opposite? A good partner, if they are not a carbon copy of you, will help you thrash these choices out and learn as you go. Most of us have a general tendency to be either too insistent or too easy-going – try to find a partner with the opposite tendency to yours.

What’s your experience? Are you working on your current project(s) with or without a partner, and how is it going?

I had the pleasure last week of having breakfast with Vivek Wadhwa, and besides being completely charming and a great breakfast companion he told me that he was about to go speak to the leaders of California’s state technology organizations.

If you follow TechCrunch or Vivek’s tweets you will know that he has written two very interesting posts subsequently, and that his posts have led to real offers from proven entrepreneurs to reduce costs and improve cycle times on major state technology projects.

What fascinates me is the extent to which culture factors will support or impede success when these small, entrepreneurial shops start to collaborate with the state to fix or overhaul these major systems.

What I mean is, it’s not enough just to have a good technical solution or well-written requirements document. Everyone reading this blog knows of many large, well-organized IT projects which either failed outright or significantly under-delivered. Every investor and technical guru I ask tells me that team dynamics are a critical success factor in technology projects. So my question is, what will these talented startups and committed civil servants do to make absolutely sure that the human factors are optimized on this effort along with cost, schedule, and functionality?

Expect to hear more from me on this. I’m a great fan of doing things better, especially when it involves interesting people and public systems.

It’s easy when you’re on a team to let little complaints leak out to others in the organization. Let’s say you start a difficult project that runs in parallel with everyone’s main job, and at the beginning not everyone in your team is pulling their weight.

If you compain about that to even one person outside the team, it affects you, the team, and the project. If two people hear about it, you start to build a reputation for the team that only a few of you are doing the real work.

Turning this around takes two steps.

First of all, you have to address it in the team. You have to give the feedback to people who are not performing and get them back on board. Second, you have to tell the real story of how you corrected the problem in the team.

You may be tempted when asked to say “Everything’s great, we’re all on track!” but if people had a perception that you had difficulties when you started off, it’s better to be honest. “At the beginning we weren’t all 100% engaged but we gave each other the feedback and came together strongly. I’m really proud of how we dealt with that and the results we’re producing now.”

The real true story will get you further than just pretending everything is perfect – most people can see right through that.

UPDATE: This week I knew I had calls with some interesting people coming up.  So I wrote this blog post Tuesday on three questions that make the most first conversations.

Then Wednesday I saw a tweet that grabbed my attention. I discovered there was a Twitter conference happening 15 miles from me that afternoon! I got to field-test the Three Questions and you can see some video evidence of the first trial runs at the end of the post.

What’s the first conversation you should have with someone interesting? How do you make the most of lunches with the cool people at the conferences you attend? Should you find out if you like the same music or movies, talk about your last vacation, or even thrill each other with a quick verbal resume? No.

Instead tell each other:

• What you’re passionately working on (not your job title or something broad like “pets”  – the specific project, problem or idea that fascinates you)
• The kind of help that would make the biggest difference to your passion project
• The kind of help you most enjoy giving others (again, not your job title, the skills or expertise you can’t NOT give away)

If you can cover all that succinctly, you’ll feel more connected and may get ideas for how to move each other’s passion projects forward.

If you want to try this experiment on Twitter, you can use the hashtags #3qs [for anything to do with these three awesome questions], and #passionproject, #helpineed, #helpigive.

Here’s the longer version – with some video from the first field-tests of the Three Questions!

If you’re like me, you don’t want to waste first conversations talking about garage door-openers or debating cloth versus disposable diapers. (My daughter is now 8, we’ve moved on to Hannah Montana and tiaras.) Nor do you want to exchange verbal resumes. You want a conversation that’s fun, passionate, and practical. A conversation that isn’t fake but might “go somewhere” if you can genuinely help each other.

Whether it’s just two of you on the phone, or a group around a table, discuss:

1. What’s your current passion project – the thing you’re pursuing that you’re most excited about?  It could be a result you’re working on, a big problem you want to solve, a breakthrough in your field. Note: this is not the same as your job title. Your passion project might be part of your current job, or not.  But it has to be something specific that lights you up.Don’t just say “helping kids,” say “starting an after school group for 9-11 yr olds in my neighborhood” or, if you don’t know that much detail, “finding a way to help pre-teens who live in Redondo Beach.” Specificity is power! You may be already working on it or on the verge of beginning, but tell each other why you’re passionate.
   For me, [newsflash!] I’m starting a book called “Massive Institutional Failure: How big organizations screw up everything and what we can do about it.” The reason I’m passionate about this is I think it’s the big unsolved bottleneck behind climate change, crappy government, lame products, and a workplace that expects my daughter to take less pay than a man in the same job.If you’re building a cabin, tell people why you love solitude or shared family time in nature. If you’re starting a company, talk about how it will change the world so people are more motivated to help you find office space or a bookkeeper.
2. Talk about the specific help that would make the biggest difference for you right now. Do you need a key hire for your team, a quiet place to write, a workout partner to keep you on your new exercise routine? Obviously the answer here is never “I need a million dollars.” What are the skills, connections, or expertise that others might be able to help you with?
3. What kind of help do you love to give? My passion is making leaders and team events awesome. Last week I helped a team from a global bank learn how to exchange honest feedback. It was for an old client, I didn’t charge him, because feedback is something I’m passionate about. When I met the team from Amazon Watch at a movie premiere last week I offered to facilitate their staff retreat pro bono.  What skills or connections do you most love using to help others with their passion projects?

If you can both address these questions in 5-10 minutes each, you can have a powerful, pragmatic, quick first phone call that may give you both some key help you need and the chance to help someone else.

Note: if you want to have this kind of conversation at a group meal at a conference, you’ll have to ask for it gently but clearly. You can’t force it, but if people agree to cover the three simple points, you might need to remind them mid-meal — we’re used to letting the conversation digress to garage door-openers and diapers. And if someone’s passion project sounds like a list of their job activities, ask them to pick one thing they have the most excitement about. You might feel like a process nerd, but if you’re heartfelt and not rigid they will usually thank you for guiding the conversation. It’s about passion, connecting, and helping each other, which is what most of us really want.

UPDATE & Videos: At the The Twitter Conference I taped Passion Project interviews with Jerry Michalski [to come] & Cianna Stewart [first video below].

Here’s seven seconds of dark grainy enthusiasm from the post-conference dinner with @Pistachio and friends. Laura is a beneficent Goddess of the Twitterverse who totally charmed me with her warmth and genuineness as a panelist and the whole dinner crowd was warm and inspiring. Their twitter links are below the little vid of us whooping after an evening of talking about our passions!

Revelers and Passion Question field testers:

http://twitter.com/mikeydoeswork
http://twitter.com/thomasscriven
http://twitter.com/pistachio
http://twitter.com/mayhemstudios
http://twitter.com/mattsingley
http://twitter.com/jstrellner
http://twitter.com/baoki
http://twitter.com/adventuregirl
http://twitter.com/krystyl
http://twitter.com/dacourt
http://twitter.com/rosecole

And me.

I think the biggest problem for human beings is working together in groups, particularly in the face of disagreement. Whether I’m consulting in big companies or talking to friends about their marriage, the problem feels the same to me. How do we work with, learn from, and respect others who we may passionately disagree with? How can we handle our disagreements so that we get closer, become wiser, do better work?

The way we deal with conflict feels to me like the the source of so many other problems, whether large (global warming, discrimination against women) or small (lame customer service, crappy products).

Tonight I’m reflecting on different tribes who I think could learn a lot from each other, partly inspired by this post from Sonia Simone of the awesome Copyblogger.

The tribes I’m thinking of tonight are what I’ll call the Social Justice tribe and the Self-Made Wealth tribe. I am part of both, or aspire to be part of both, and feel like there’s an antagonism at times that spoils what could be an amazing collaboration.

I just spent a week in Brazil with people who help small farming families to live in and care for the Atlantic rainforest. They call themselves Floresta Viva, “the living forest.”  This is the second year I have visited this inspiring group and some of the farmers they work with. I am blown away by the wisdom of their approach – combining environmental preservation with greater self-sufficiency for these forest families. Last year one of the farmers talked about his time living in a big city working in a factory. He said he made more money then, but was happier farming in the forest with his family.

In the Social Justice tribe we say that work like this needs to be promoted and supported. It needs attention, funding, and government policies that will help it thrive. And we rail against greed and narrow self-interest, as in the case of a large proposed port and railway hub that would destroy thousands of acres of the nearby forest. In our most over-simplifying moments, we start to think everything to do with business and money is bad.

Note: the only reason I was able to spend time with this project in Brazil is that a large bank hires me to run leadership courses that include a heavy component of social responsibility and environmental sustainability.

In the Self-Made Wealth tribe, we hustle to get out the word about our products and services. I’ve been a facilitator and coach for fifteen years, driven by my passion to help people work together. I’m working on turning my knowledge into products, partly inspired by meeting Floresta Viva last year. I realized that there are tons of little social sector organizations around the world who could benefit from better teamwork, more effective meetings, and other things my business clients use me for. I will never get to them all in person, and they couldn’t pay me anyway (never mind the emissions from all that travel).

So last year I had a vision of putting everything I know online, for free, so that any group in the world could have it and use it if they wanted. And then I met the online marketing gurus, and started to learn about information products. And while I’m still very inspired about changing the world by helping groups work together better, sometimes I get on a little ego-trip of all the attention I’ll get or money I’ll make once I learn how to market and scale up what I do. And sometimes I feel a lot of judgement toward people whose main message seems to be “I’ll help you get rich!” In person, I have found a lot of them have a deep social conscience. But sometimes the externals are just too glitzy and lavish for my tastes, and the notion of helping people seems like a means to sell more product.

In truth I think both tribes need each other. For starters in my field, facilitation and leadership development, we absolutely suck at marketing what we do. If we were more effective, a lot of people would be a lot happier at work, and a lot more lame bosses would have been coached or fired. Women would make equal pay, no one at work would care if you were straight or gay, and bureacracy would wither.

Equally in the Self-Made Wealth world, we need to ask ourselves whether we’re really and truly helping the people who most need help, or just finding the most lucrative market and keeping ourselves insulated from the suffering and destruction that are very real in the world.

Do you feel like part of either of these tribes? What do you think they have to learn from each other?

What do you think?

Is there anyone who doesn’t love Seth Godin’s blog?

I think it’s one of the first blogs I subscribed to by email because I didn’t want to miss anything.

Today he’s got a post on why joint ventures fail. It’s a quick and worthwhile read, but the problem he points to goes way beyond joint ventures. In a word, one key point of failure is lack of clear accountability. If you work in or with a large organization, you need no further explanation.  If you’re one of my clients whose started to use a methodology called the Action Cycle, you have way more traction on this. For every task in your work, there is a clear definition of the outcome and who is responsible for exactly what so that the outcome gets produced.

One of my clients last year led his retail bank branch region to become number one in the country using the Action Cycle. In a future post I’ll write more about what it is and how it can save you time, lower costs, help you lose weight, get dates, and get rippling abs.  OK, well, it does help a lot with the time/money/business performance stuff…you’re on your own for the rest.

At the end of this post is a great video of Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, talking about how it all started out as a hunch.  I’ll bet you’re working on something right now that might have a breakthrough if you tried out one of your hunches.  Here’s my hunch story and then the video of @ev.

In 2004 I had to get eight thousand overworked middle managers to schedule a training day they hadn’t asked for, show up for that training 2-3 months later, and not cancel, reschedule, or mysteriously “get the flu” when the day arrived. If even a small percentage of them no-showed or rescheduled, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Either my company would wind up running make-up sessions for free to fulfill our contract, or the client would have to pay extra because the original sessions hadn’t covered everybody.

My buddy Jason Gore and I locked ourselves in a room all day with two of our clients to figure out how to make this work. For hours on end we talked ourselves into and out of various options.  We tried mandated attendance dates – seemingly high control but also high risk of no-shows.  What about letting everyone pick their own date?  Not practical, e.g. if all eight thousand wanted to attend on the same day. It was one of those meetings where after the first few hours your brain starts to feel like mush and the whiteboards are covered with increasingly meaningless sentence fragments (“initiative vs. yield!!”). Outside we could see the parking lot emptying, and the options for buoying our dwindling blood sugar were vending machine potato chips and Oreo three-packs. We called it quits for the night, convinced we’d tried every possible approach and that they all had some fatal flaw.

Around this time I’d been reading about complexity theory and self-organizing systems like markets. In a distracted, rambling tone I wondered aloud to my boss Phil whether there was some connection between complex systems and our training scheduling problem. We were driving through Virginia at night and I think I literally said to him “I know this is too crazy to actually work but…what if we established some kind of ‘market’ for the seats in the training? Like if we gave everybody some kind of token or something, maybe with provisional training dates, and if they didn’t like it, they could just find someone else to trade with. That way we don’t have to figure it all out, we just set up a little ecosystem of sorts and let them figure it out.” In his typically wise and laid back way, Phil neither dismissed the idea nor insisted that I immediately resolve every detail of it. We continued our drive and leisurely conversation until we got to our hotel that night.

The next day, something like a market was exactly what we settled on to solve the scheduling problem.  Of course there were more hair-raising turns to actually get all the players to buy into that idea and make it work.  We needed a big chunk of time in the company’s upcoming Departmental VP meeting to hash out the schedule.  But we found out that meeting was scheduled for the next day.  And the VP’s knew nothing about the training yet.  We had a matter of hours to “sell” the VP’s on the training, get onto their packed meeting agenda, and find out when would be a good time for a few thousand of their staff to take a day away from work.  No problem! The company had gone from 2,000 employees to 20,000 in a few years and, yeah, ‘time for training’ was a laugh-in-your-face kind of concept at that point.

As we sprinted through our power-schmoozing of the executives and their all-important assistants, I thought ahead to the VP meeting the next day.  I remembered the advice of the facilitation gurus who’d mentored me at Interaction Associates.  They’d taught me that for any complex group problem-solving, you had to focus everyone on one shiny visual at the front of the room, and not let people space out flipping through printed handouts.

I realized that if we had each VP staring down at their own copy of the training schedule, the meeting would likely fall apart.  I could imagine the scene, heavy with the pregnant silence of unvoiced skepticism (“What the hell’s this training for anyway?” “You mean every single salaried employee’s gonna do it?” “The whole company in the next three months??”) I pictured them quietly turning pages until the first one finally said “Yeah…I don’t think these dates are gonna work for my department.”  I knew if those words were spoken, we’d be sunk. One objection would be followed by another and another until we were kicked out and told to “think it all through again from the beginning.” The VP’s could sit back, content in the knowledge that their hard-nosed realism had prevented what had obviously been a train-wreck in the making.  If they were lucky the whole idea might just go away without further disruption to the real work of managing their phenomenal growth.

Fast forward to 1 am that night, the scene of the final hunch. To prevent “training date organ rejection” I had roped my client Julie into helping execute another of my “I know this might seem weird, but….” ideas.  I wanted the visual training schedule at the front of the VP meeting to be big.  Like, airplane-hangar-wallpaper big.  We were at the local Kinko’s getting them made up and laminated, so punchy that I’m sure the copy crew thought we’d been out partying.  I think we had to put the back seats of the car down to cart them out of there.  But the underlying message we hoped the huge graphics would convey was “Getting everyone through this quickly and cheaply is a shared task. If you don’t like your dates, the solution to that problem is to trade amongst yourselves.”

In the end, all these hunches paid off and it worked. I’m sure you guessed that, given that I’m using this story to illustrate my point.  But don’t just take my word for it, listen to Ev talking about how Twitter started off as a hunch:

Now it’s your turn.  What are you most passionate about right now, and what’s your hunch that’s “so crazy it would probably never work?” How would you start to act on it? Who can support you, and how?

I’m having what I’ll call a “jet-lag organic” morning, which is to say that my sleep cycle is pretty disrupted from 12 days in Europe last week so I woke up very early and have been lazily browsing through email and things online for a few hours.

Chris Brogan who I follow on Twitter just published what I think is the best of several recent pieces on social media. (If you haven’t heard the term social media before it just means all the online conversations about life, business, politics, products, parenting etc. that new-ish tools have enabled in the past couple of years. And the interesting consequences of those conversations.)

I have seen other recent pieces in the NYT and even in the Financial Times while I was in London, but I didn’t think they added a lot to the discussion. But in my role as social media trailblazer in my consulting community, I wanted to pass Chris’s piece along right away.

I came to a crossroads, however, trying to compose a nice “business-y” email from the comfort of my bed in the wee hours. Feeling a bit lazy and groggy, but also wanting to move my colleagues to actually read the link I was sending, I felt stuck between writing in a ‘business’ voice and just finishing the email quickly and without too much effort. I finally just said “this is hot, read it.”

I’m not a particular user of the word ‘hot’ in general, let alone in a business context. And granted my audience of consulting colleagues are also good friends, so sounding like a vapid Angelino for a moment wasn’t going to harm my reputation or brand. But I realized in that my momemtary writing dilemma felt like a microcosm of how business communication is changing. We are bombarded by so much casual conversation now, and social media are breaking down older more formal tones. And, quite frankly, I think it’s hot.

Have you noticed changes in how you communicate in a business setting? Or how others communicate with you? What’s being gained, and what if anything is being lost?

I like the tweets from @RedStarVIP on Twitter. This morning I saw one that said “The Art of Execution” followed by a link. That topic teaser sounded generic to me, but because it was from redstarvip I clicked.