Organizational Democracy

San Francisco, Day 3, Wednesday November 14, 11am-9pm:

11am-12pm - phone call with Michael about our ‘wow themes’ article.  (Note to self: find way to write about personal business interactions on blog.)

12pm-1pm - bus ride through the sunlit streets of San Francisco

1pm-6pm - work at Citizen Space editing interviews and doing other work

6pm-9pm - return to house, work, talk, eat, sleep

San Francisco, Day 3, Wednesday, 6am-11am:

Wednesday: Awake in Zen Monastery, leave with Kirk and bicycle back to San Francisco. We’re still on the tired side and I have a phone call in five hours.

As we get to Sausalito, I’m a bit trepidatious of the big hill back, so I make up some silly dialogue which I shout aloud: “Hello, it is I, Sausalito!” “Why have you come here, Sausalito, to this valley at the bottom of the hill?” “To go up!!!!!” (as I point my arm up into the sky, getting energy from the silliness and the shouting and the gesture)

Kirk adds in, “Doesn’t Sausalito mean ‘little saucer’?” And the dialogue continues.

We bicycle, I notice, much as the geese I heard about lead. As one of us gets tired, he falls back, letting the other lead the way. Or as one of us gets a burst of energy, he speeds ahead, as the other falls back to let him lead.

We don’t have much of a wind resistance problem being a leader, but we do choose the pathway, and we do turn our necks to make sure the other is still behind us every now and then, and for me at least, I want to feel I’m bicycling with someone and that’s harder if I don’t see the person.

Arriving at the base of the Sausalito hill, we are passed by two bicyclists going Triplets of Belleville-style. “How do they do it?” Kirk and I wonder. But after a bit, it’s not so hard. Arriving at the top, we both feel as if it took less time to go up than it had to come down.

As we glide over the Golden Gate Bridge with the morning light, I’m happy we stayed at the monastery overnight.

We decide to get hot chocolate at Ghirardelli Square. The first store we see is a “Chocolate Warehouse.” A smiling lady offers us both samples. I notice one end has been snipped off of the plastic wrapper, and I carefully pour the chocolate square into my hand before eating it. It’s good, minty chocolate. Kirk’s chocolate square falls on the ground. The lady hands him another square.

“90% of them fall on the floor,” she says. “The wrapper is snipped open so people don’t have to unwrap it, but people don’t notice the wrapper is open. My ear is trained to the sound of the chocolate falling on the floor. They’re walking into the next room, I hear the sound, I get another piece of chocolate to give to them, then they see their chocolate on the floor, they say, ‘How did you know?!’“

We ask if she has hot chocolate in this store.

“No,” she says, and tells us to go to the square’s cafe around the corner. “He’ll probably give you another square when you get there,” she says with a sad smile.

He does give us another square when we get there. I start to feel a little ill, thinking how she knows so well how customers move around, dropping chocolate out of the pre-snipped wrappers, and how someone somewhere probably thinks he or she is a genius for realizing you can save customers the trouble of unwrapping chocolate by snipping one edge off.

Musak is playing in Ghiradelli Square. Funny, isn’t it, says Kirk, how malls were created to recreate the experience of a town square, and now outdoors, town squares are recreated to be like a mall?

The hot chocolate tastes like regular hot chocolate. We return the bicycles, and I get on the bus back to Haight-Ashbury.

[Photo credits: Ghirardelli Square, Ghirardelli Squares(tm)]

San Francisco, Day 2, Tuesday:

No writing or photos can give you the trolleycar ride experience.  It is completely physical, completely wind rushing by, holding on the the pole, completely everyday-rollercoaster exhilarating.

Kirk is a friend from New York.  We meet up at Fisherman’s Wharf and rent bicycles.

Our plan is ambitious: bike to Muir Woods and back.  It’s 40 miles round-trip.

The top of the map (the black diagonal line is where we’ll cross over a 1,500 foot mountain range):

The bottom of the map:

The guy who rents us our bikes wittily refers to this map as our GPS.

Just below the lower-left corner of this photo, two girls on bikes ask Kirk and me if they can take our picture for us.  Kirk suggests we all, sweaty, get in the picture together, and we do, grinning.

We all bike over the Golden Gate Bridge, then down the hill to Sausalito.

The girls get lunch, and Kirk and I continue on.

In Mill Valley, we stop at a traffic light.  An 85 year-old lady asks where we’re going.  We tell her Muir Woods.  She asks if we have strong legs.  And then, caressing my shoulder with her fingers, she looks at my legs and says, “You do have strong legs.”  Good grief.  Her friend hobbles up, eyeing Kirk salaciously, and we bike for the hills.

The ascent along Sequoia is steep but, when we ask for directions, we’re told we can make it.  “You’re energetic,” they say.

At the top, where Panoramic Hwy rides the ridge, Kirk and I look down at The Land Before Time-style valley.

“Do you want us to keep going?” I ask Kirk.  “Because I could go on, or I could go back.” 

Kirk is totally committed to going on.

The red arrow on the map shows our descent from Panoramic Hwy to Muir Woods.

The trees are perhaps the tallest in the world.  I touch one.  It feels like the skin of an old man or woman.  If I let my imagination run, I feel as if the tree is waiting for something.

Kirk and I head back to San Francisco, but after a few hundred feet we pass by some deer.  They don’t mind us at all, even though we’re only ten feet from them.  It’s the closest I’ve ever been to a deer without its startling.  We observe them for a long time, then continue on.

Fog has begun to set in.  We are literally bicycling through a cloud.  The top of the cloud is 100 feet above our heads.

With the fog, it gets dark.  It’s only 5 p.m. but we can barely see the road.  Then to our right, we see a sign:  “Green Gulch Farms.”

Green Gulch Farms had been recommended to me by a coworker the day before, but I hadn’t known where it was.  Now, in the middle of the dark and the fog, Kirk and I decide to descend to the twinkling lights of the buildings below.

“After all,” I think, “I’ve always wanted to stay at a Zen monastery.”

People are having their night off, but a friendly guy finds the woman who books the guest house.  It’s her night off too.  Kirk and I are stressed to bother them.  But we don’t want to continue along the road tonight.

The guesthouse has a stovepipe pole in the middle of the house which goes all the way to the roof.  Rooms are along the perimeter of the house.  Kirk and I get our room, go to a communal dinner, and then I choose to go to a Zendo meditation.

I don’t have time to read the rules.  After it’s over, I’m shown what to do.  But first, there’s 90 minutes of silence, with each of us facing a wall, with our own thoughts and body, and a 10-minute walking meditation in the middle.

I think about the geese metaphor which I’d read the day before.  I play out different ways to turn it into a story on leadership.

I review the events of the day.

Back in the guesthouse, I try to call my couchsurfing host, but neither Kirk nor I get cellphone reception.  I turn on my laptop and bingo! we have a connection.

Kirk writes his friend who’s hosting him:

“I won’t be able to make it back to your apartment tonight.  I was biking back from Muir Woods when the fog came in quickly and night fell.  Fortunately, I found a zen monastery that has taken me in for the night.  I’ll be back tomorrow….”

I write my couchsurfing host:

“I went bicycling with a friend to Muir Woods today, and on the way back fog set in and it was dark, so we decided to stay at Green Gulch Farm, a friendly Zen monastery with guest rooms….”

[Photo credits: Fisherman's Wharf with cable car, Bicycle map, Golden Gate Bridge, Sausalito, Google Maps, Muir Woods, Google Earth road photo, Green Gulch Farm]

San Francisco, Day 1, 3pm-midnight 

At Citizen Space, my afternoon is editing interviews.  Andrea emails me.  She’s seen my Gmail chat headline “in SF - at http://citizenspace.us/ and tells me it looks great.  I feel good knowing that she’s checked out where I am and something I care about.  I’ve only recently started updating my whereabouts on Gmail chat, so her message encourages me to keep it up.

While I work, Tara and Chris present to a client.  Earlier I’d thought he was a friend, then a coworker, and now he’s a client.  As the meeting unfolds on the whiteboards, each of them contribute jokes, suggestions and questions.  I know this is a new long-term goal of mine: to have clients who are friends and coworkers.

* * * 

Later that night, back in Haight-Ashbury at the People’s Cafe, I get an email from Geoff Slinker (yes, we have the same letters in our last names) who started the great Workplace Democracy listserve.

Geoff writes:

“If a company is setup such that management is reviewed by those they manage and if a series of bad reviews results in a change of position or leaving the company what happens if the Owner of the business is also the CEO and the company gives the CEO several bad scores on his/her review?

Could you as the Owner relinquish the position as CEO?

It stands to reason that if you have setup such a review process you have already addressed the issues of command and control. Therefore I think you could.”

He mentions an article by Ralph Stayer, the CEO of Johnsonville Sausage — “How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead.”  Rereading it, I’m uplifted by the geese metaphor:

“I tried to picture what Johnsonville would have to be to sell the most expensive sausage in the industry and still have the biggest market share. What I saw in my mind’s eye was definitely not an organization where I made all the decisions and owned all the problems. What I saw was an organization where people took responsibility for their own work, for the product, for the company as a whole. If that happened, our product and service quality would improve, our margins would rise, and we could reduce costs and successfully enter new markets. Johnsonville would be much less vulnerable to competition.

The image that best captured the organizational end state I had in mind for Johnsonville was a flock of geese on the wing. I didn’t want an organizational chart with traditional lines and boxes, but a “V” of individuals who knew the common goal, took turns leading, and adjusted their structure to the task at hand. Geese fly in a wedge, for instance, but land in waves. Most important, each individual bird is responsible for its own performance.”

San Francisco, Day 1, 2PM-3PM 

Back at Citizen Space, I get asked more about what I do:

What deliverables do you present to your clients?
With my own clients?

Yes.
I like to do workalongs — interviews and observation of how people are working.  What are they doing?  What’s great?  What’s frustrating?  Where do they want to go?  This can be presented to the client as video and write-ups.

Then the client can choose to proceed with me or on their own.  We do iterative project management.  People at the company work in teams for a small part of their time, and every two weeks, we have deliverables. 

This can be new web pages, or a new timesheet login process, or anything people at the company want to do to make their work and lives better.  And the really inspiring thing for me is, over even three or six months, people at the company get used to working this way, and I’m not needed anymore.  They do it on their own.

It’s intense process-consulting.
Yes.