Navigating Stormy Seas

Wow! The past few days have been transformative.

This past weekend (Friday through Sunday) I participated in the last Co-Active Coaching course in the series, entitled Synergy.

Based on CTI's penchant for euphemism, I inferred that it would tie together the themes of the previous three courses and integrate them into practice.

Yes, and . . .

It did that, plus it gave me some new tools.

Wait. "Tools" is the wrong metaphor. I'm not a carpenter or mechanic. I'm growing myself.

OK. Gardeners use tools, too. I'll stay with "tools". Back to Synergy . . .

Refining my Life Purpose

I was called forth to get out of my head and into my heart, to refine my Life Purpose Statement, and live into that space, that purpose.

It was intense.

And now, my Life Purpose (which will probably continue to evolve):

I am the Pirate who guides teams to take charge and helps people find treasure in their work.

Living into that has been rather fun.  On Sunday, the last day of the entire series of courses, I stood tall in front of my coaching colleagues, placed my right foot on a chair, struck a pose reminiscent of Captain Morgan, and declared that Life Purpose (in its form at the time). Little did I know how I would start living into that purpose over the following two days.

Be More Pirate

On Monday, I had an online meeting with Sam Conniff Allende, author of the upcoming book, Be More Pirate. (You can wait to buy that U.S. edition due out in December, or you can do what I did: get it now from amazon.co.uk. For two bucks, I had it shipped express and it arrived in Seattle in four days.)

Anyway, back to my meeting with Sam. Our topic: how to nurture a community around his call to action:

• Rebel against status quo


• Rewrite the rules


• Reorganize for effectiveness


• Redistribute power and make an enemy of exploitation


• Retell the story: weaponize it and tell the hell out of it

Or, in Sam's words, "Make good trouble."

So we had a thrilling discussion about how to nurture the community that is already rising up.

(In an early draft of this post, I called it "building community," not nurturing it. That's not a good description. The community will grow, no matter what Sam or I do. We can seed the community with some platforms, water it with some invitations and engagement, but then we have to stand back and see what emerges. And if we do nothing, a community will still try to emerge among the weeds and bramble by the side of the Information Superhighway.)

Sam and I have a strategy, sort of. We'll launch a few things and see what floats.

Interviewing Michael DeAngelo

Later that same day (we're still talking about Monday, two days ago), I met with former Deputy CIO of the State of Washington (and now partner at HolacracyOne), Michael DeAngelo.

I wanted to interview him about his observations and lessons learned from implementing Holacracy. In particular I wanted to hear about the pain points to inform my book project: Hacking Holacracy.

We spent three hours discussing it, and BOY was my brain full at the end!

Probably my single biggest takeaway: when launching in a subset of a larger organization, build alliances with key players. In his case, he spoke with the state equivalents of the HR director, legal office, and CEO's (governor's) office. Get in front of the issue and frame the dialogue on your own terms.

Be proactive. Win allies for your team.

DeAngelo was operating in a highly politicized, threat-rich environment. I, at Google, am not. But I would still love to have allies in key places, especially among directors, VPs, and the ExecDev team.

How does this live in my Pirate space? I'm doing research to write an ebook for Googlers. Hacking Holacracy will be about how teams can reorganize themselves, how to shake up the status quo that we've inherited from the Industrial Age, and how to redistribute power.

After I get the book out for Googlers, I'll look into what it will take to publish it to the world. Google is my moonshot. If I can get Holacracy (or something like it) a foothold at Google, it will have a ripple effect. Google's organizational culture is a model tha

t others emulate. Not everyone does, but many do.

ConnectleCon: Self Management without Dogma

The last punctuation in my recent days was yesterday. I was a panelist on a web conference, a ConnectleCon. Connectle hosts these hour-long panel discussions about once per month. The topics range from living into your purpose, to Working Out Loud, to connected leadership, to being human at work, to yesterday's topic: Self Management without Dogma.

Mara, one of Connectle's co-founders, had invited me to join the panel after we met and I described my Hacking Holacracy book project. I emphatically agreed. (Well, I was emphatic in my own mind, but I probably looked shy about it at the time.)

So yesterday, without seeking Google's permission, I shared my observations and experiences from my Google team's experiment with Holacracy in front of a real-time audience. (And it was a lot easier than public speaking on a stage. While I knew that the audience could hear and see me, I couldn't see them, and I didn't pay much attention to the text chatter that was streaming by.

It was a small step, but it felt like I was going rogue. And it felt good.

Click here if you'd like to join Connectle.

Oh, there was one last thing. Realizing that I was stepping into my Pirate space, I started seizing that identity. I'm replacing my profile photo with a picture from 2011: me in a pirate Halloween costume (shown above), striking a fierce pose in my desk chair at Google. I've update it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gravatar, and Google+. I'm sure backwater sites with my old profile photo will show up for weeks.

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How do you show up and live into your Life Purpose? Need help exploring that? I'd love to help: bkh@briankhaney.com.