As you can see from Renee and Natalie’s posts, bootcamp is back! This time, I’ve got six great participants, with Anna and Marie returning for another round, and some tweaks based on what I learned from my first try. (My other participants, Lauren and Allison, will introduce themselves on this blog this week. My friend, Amy Luckey, is observing, and she may pop onto this blog with her thoughts as well.)

As before, this is as much bootcamp for me as it is for the other participants. The project I’m bringing to the table, once again, is the bootcamp itself. And the big question on my mind this time around is: How can I leverage the bigger group?

With just two people, it was easy to give my participants lots of individual attention and to customize the workouts. With six very different people, all with different projects and skill levels, that won’t be possible.

However, more people also equals more opportunities. The additional diversity will make things more interesting, and it will also allow me to do things I wasn’t able to do with just two, because it will introduce more complicated group dynamics. I have a “power dynamics” workout for one of the later sessions that I’m super excited about and that I couldn’t do with just two people.

A related, underlying question is: How big of a group can I manage, while keeping the quality of everyone’s experiences very high? I don’t know what the upper limit is, but if I’m disciplined about writing myself out of the design, it will bounded by room size, not by the exercises. I need to leverage space and time to encourage quality interactions, and I need to give them permission and encouragement to facilitate themselves. That, after all, is the point of bootcamp — to give them the opportunity to practice these skills.

Looking forward to learning with this group, and sharing what I learn over the next several weeks!

When I first started crafting this experiment, I wanted to come up with a set of ground rules that embodied the spirit of this work. Having done this kind of work for a decade, I had lots and lots of potential ground rules to draw from. However, the three I chose were quite different from ones I’ve used in the past.

1. Be nice to yourself. Many changemakers I know tend to want to take care of others before they take care of themselves. In fact, many seem to feel guilty about taking care of themselves. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, changemaking needs to start with self-compassion. I wanted to establish that from the very beginning, and I’m glad that I did. Anna and Marie joked that I cited this rule so often, it should go on a T-shirt. Great idea!

2. Be nice to others. Self-explanatory, but good to make explicit.

3. Don’t be nice. I went to see the YouthSpeaks finals a few years ago, and I noticed that the participants would shout this in support of their peers on stage. I loved it! Making change isn’t about being nice. Neither is learning. It’s about being real. I realize that this rule seems to conflict with ground rules 1 and 2, but one of the key literacies in today’s world is effectively balancing tensions, so I felt perfectly comfortable with this.

What do you think about these ground rules? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below!

Last Wednesday, we finished the first Changemaker Bootcamp! I can’t believe how quickly four weeks went by, and I am very grateful to Marie Haller and Anna Castro for being wonderful, inaugural participants.

This first round was meant to be an experiment. My goal was to test the model and to explore possible answers to some of my strategic questions about this project. I intentionally kept it small and was selective with my first participants, and I learned a ton from the process.

In particular, I got to test the basic premise — that a focus on practice with feedback rather than “imparting knowledge” is valuable and much needed — and some specific exercises in a safe space. This was my own opportunity to practice, and it helped tremendously. It also helped me flesh out my overall conceptual framework, which will help me be more intentional in designing future workouts and assessments.

Some key takeaways:

• Place to practice and process. In conceiving this, I originally focused on creating a place to practice. What I realized from this first session was that bootcamp is a great place for people to process — to reflect on their everyday work, to integrate their learnings, and to be more strategic in the moment. That’s different from doing a retrospective or going on a retreat after your project is over, because it allows you to learn and adapt more quickly.
• Practice matters. That said, the original premise still stands. I was delighted to see the impact that even small amounts of practice had, and I was even more delighted to see the participants become very aware of this.
• The homework worked really well. It forced participants to think about how they were going to put what they practiced in bootcamp into practice immediately in their own projects. It also kept the work very grounded in their real lives.

Some decisions and open questions moving forward:

• I’m definitely going to do another round. For this next round, I’m going to target six-to-eight participants instead of two. I’ll be increasing the length of the sessions from 90 minutes to two hours in order to accommodate the larger camp size. Finally, I’m going to extend the cycle from four to six weeks.
• It will stay once a week. I went back and forth on this the entire four weeks. On the one hand, an extra session per week would have made a big difference in terms of integrating some of this work, and it’s more in line with a real bootcamp in terms of building habits. On the other hand, homework would not be realistic for a twice-a-week session, and as I stated above, the homework turned out to be a really valuable part of the experience. I like the balance of practicing with each other, then practicing at work once a week.
• Face-to-face only. I originally thought that I’d experiment with a remote version of this after I tried a few face-to-face versions. I realize I have no interest in this. A remote version is definitely doable (and I’d be happy to help design it if others are interested in pursuing this), I’m just not motivated to do it. There are plenty of changemakers in San Francisco who need something like this, so I’m going to focus my energy there. That said, I’d like to create something that scales, and so I’ll continue to put energy into sharing what I learn and fostering a larger community, so that this model has the potential to spread and replicate without me in the center.
• Integrating technology into the process. Not doing a remote version doesn’t mean that I won’t be addressing technology-mediated collaboration. I think this blog worked well, and I’m going to introduce a chat-like function for participants to encourage more asynchronous interaction during the week. I’ll also likely create practice opportunities for technology-mediated collaboration: from teleconferences to far more sophisticated types of engagement. Again, all of the fundamental principles and exercises apply regardless of what tools people use to collaborate.
• Should I charge for the next round? I am definitely looking to charge for this. I strongly believe this format — even in my early explorations with it — is far more useful than traditional trainings and content. I’m in the process of doing some research to figure out what the right pricing is. The question is whether I should figure this out first before doing another round, whether I should just do another round for free again, or whether I should do something in-between and charge something nominal. Thoughts? And again, to be clear, I fully plan to continue to do this work in a completely open source way, meaning all of the content will be available for people to steal and replicate.

If you have questions or comments, please post below. If you’d like to be notified about what happens next, subscribe to our newsletter!

At our first session, I had Anna and Marie brainstorm their questions about their projects. (Marie mentioned hers in a subsequent blog post.) I gave them five minutes to come up with many questions as they could, and then I had them repeat the exercise over and over again.

Why? Because I think that asking generative questions is one of the most fundamental skills that every changemaker should have. This first exercise was designed to force our participants to think in question form. I call it my “Jeopardy!” exercise for short, because everything needs to be in the form of the question.

This exercise is not about quality. It’s about coverage — making sure you think as comprehensively as possible about a problem. It’s good practice as an individual, and it works even better with a group, because you get a broader swath of questions, and get to see how others think about the same problem.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not just a trainer, I’m also a participant. When I started designing this bootcamp, I started with this very brainstorming exercise, and I continue to add, organize, and refine. You can read and add your comments to a live link to my questions. As always, feedback encouraged!

Anna and Marie interview people on the street for stories about effective collaboration.

Yesterday, we completed our second bootcamp session, and we are now halfway through this experiment! I’ve really enjoyed watching Marie and Anna practice, seeing what exercises work and what needs to be tweaked, but more importantly, watching their growth process. The point of bootcamp is not for me to teach. The point is to give participants an opportunity to tap into their own collective wisdom and to practice the skills they need to be successful. It’s fun and fulfilling watching this manifest itself.

As I mentioned before, I’m practicing too, and I’m learning a lot in the process. In this spirit, I’m now publishing the workout plans. These include the original plans as well as what actually happened (I do a fair bit of improvisation) and lessons learned. Feel free to steal them, use them, adapt them, and share them. I’d love to hear your questions, thoughts, compliments, and criticisms in the comments section!

Our inaugural Changemaker Bootcamp participants: Anna Castro and Marie Haller.

Last Wednesday, April 10, 2013, we kicked off the very first Changemaker Bootcamp at the offices of the Asian Law Caucus in downtown San Francisco! Changemaker Bootcamp is an experiment in providing a space for changemakers in organizations to:

• Get clear about the kinds of shifts they’d like to make in their organizations or networks
• Get clear about how to facilitate those shifts
• Practice the skills necessary to facilitate those shifts

(I wrote more about my motivations for trying this experiment on my personal blog.)

I’m thrilled to have Anna Castro of the Asian-American Center for Advancing Justice and Marie Haller of The Hub Bay Area as my inaugural participants. Over the next few weeks, they’ll blog about their projects and some of their takeaways from this little experiment here.

And so will I. I’m a changemaker too, and this bootcamp is itself a project of the bootcamp. (How meta is that?!) I’ll be blogging about the “workout” plans, explaining why I designed them the way I did, and what I learned from watching Marie and Anna do the work.

You can follow everything we do by following this blog or by subscribing to our mailing list. And I’d encourage you not only to follow, but to participate by posting comments and thoughts. Many thanks!