more on enriching practices
Last week, I wrote in praise of practices that you can keep getting good at over decades and that make you good as you do so. My rough theory is that such practices exist for individuals and for organizations and it’s good for both to identify them.
Some examples of enriching practices on the individual level:
writing
exercise
gardening
deep listening (to another person, maybe especially one of another generation)
On the team level, I think it can depend a good bit on what the team exists to do or deliver. Sometimes I think of all teams as having a "widget" that they make: this might be smaller and less shiny than the thing they sell or advertise or fundraise on. The action or choice required to make that widget can be a practice like the one I'm pointing to in the blurb. On Ben's teams at Collegiate Academies, I think one of our widgets was "a candid feedback exchange among adults" and another was "explaining to a teenager why the work at hand matters". Those widgets weren't test scores or college acceptances or years-long relationships with colleagues / teachers, in and of themselves. They were practices that led to those outputs, practices that CA folks got better and better at over time. And practices I found matured me and the people around me.
I could muster widget examples from political campaigns and biotech startups – two other kinds of places I've spent some years trying to make sense of really impressive people around me doing really good work. If I abstract from the concrete examples across these contexts, I think of these widgets as small - maybe the smallest - discrete units of the organization's mission. If the mission is a humane one, these discrete units often seem to be humane and humanizing, too.
Knowing your widgets can be really helpful - you can have job candidates create them during hiring and orientation, you can dedicate cash and time to training people how to make them, you can use your COO-brain to strip away costs and faff that keep people from making more of them.
-eric
