GA 281 | Building an Online Community of Practice with Katie Anderson and Karyn Ross

How do you set up and create group dynamics so that people feel safe to be able to share, to be real? And what does that look like? And then how do you do that in a more remote setting?

Today, I'm excited to welcome Katie Anderson and Karen Ross to the show. Now, as longtime listeners already know, both Katie and Karen have been on the show as individuals. But today, today, Karen and Katie came on together to talk about how they're building online virtual communities of practice. During the show, we talk about the history of these communities as well as how technology we all have access to today is allowing for these online communities to form and once formed, take on a life of their own. Katie and Karen are two of my favorite lean thinkers, and as always, we had a lot of fun. Show notes for this episode can be found on over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 281. Finally, I want to personally invite you to take your own virtual tour of all Gemba Academy has to offer by registering for a free no strings attached three day trial where you can view all we have to offer. Simply go to gembaacademy.com, scroll to the bottom of the homepage where you'll see a button to register for the three day trial. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Katie and Karen, how are you guys?

Great. How are you, Ron?

Yeah, absolutely fabulous. How are you, Ron?

Oh, really good, really good. All right, well, two of my favorite people on at the same time, so I don't know what I did to deserve this, but, you know, you both have been on in past podcasts in solo shows, but now we're teaming up and having Katie and Karen on at the same time, so that's pretty exciting. I know you guys have a lot of friends out there listening right now, so. Well, yeah, thanks for carving out time, first of all, to come on the show. So, Katie, where are you calling in from?

I am calling from the San Francisco Bay area in California.

And Karen, I'm at home today in my studio in Naperville, Illinois, 35 miles west of Chicago.

Beautiful, Beautiful. All right. And I'm here in Keller, Texas, in case anybody cares. All right.

The whole country covered.

Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. We really do. All right, cool. Hey, ladies, before we jump into the topic of the day, you know how we like to get started, we like to begin with a quote. So do you guys have one that you want to share?

Absolutely, and maybe we'll say it together, but one.

Is way more than two.

One plus One is way more than two. And this was a quote from ASAO Yoshino when he and I were talking. He was John Shook's first boss at Toyota, and you might have talked about it him much before Ron, about the power of network and community. It's become sort of Karen's and my mantra and really played out on the topic we're going to talk about today.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. One plus one equals. Is way more than two. Right. Way is very important. Right. Way more than two. All right. Well, really, I guess the. I don't know if we would come up with a theme for the day. It would seem to be maybe around what we're calling community of practice. Is that a fair statement?

Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that I noticed is that a number of years ago when I worked in different organizations, it was really common to have what we would call a community of practice. And people who were. It wasn't just for lean. It was all different things that people had similar interests in and they began to, you know, work together, come together as a community. They'd have some learning, they'd have some practice together. And they were really, really super popular. And over the last little while, I hadn't heard anything about them and they seemed to have died out. And I really thought, you know, we go to so many different places. I speak at so many different conferences around the world. I meet so many different people who are working on the same things. Doesn't matter whether it's Europe, South America, North America. And I thought, what happened to this idea of community of practice? And shouldn't we all be working together as a community to improve our practice wherever we are now?

If you look back, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, when the Internet wasn't what it is today, how did you guys see that community of practice manifest itself back then?

Well, one of the things that people felt was problematic was that, oh, we have, you know, if you were working in a large organization, a national or multinational organization, maybe people would call in or maybe they would say, the problem is, you know, we're here in our one location and another location can't join us, or there's, you know, we can't see each other, we forget the people on the phone. And there were a variety of problems. But as you said, technology is now not what it was then.

Yeah, exactly the same thing. We felt really limited by geography. And what we've discovered now is that with the technology, geography is sort of irrelevant.

Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. So you guys have launched a. What's the right word? Cohort. What's the technical term for what you guys have put together?

Really an online community of practice. And we launched different cohorts. We're calling it K2C2. Either Katie and Karen or Karen and Katie's Community Coaching Community. So that's where the K2C2 came from. And we just wrapped up actually today, the first cohort series of coaching sessions. And it was just a fabulous experience and we learned so much. Yeah.

Well, congratulations on getting us started and I want to hear more about it later in the show. But I guess right now what I'm really curious is to hear from you guys what you've learned because I know today wasn't the first time that you guys have done this type of community. I know Karen for sure you do a lot of virtual coaching with folks. So I want to kind of focus in on that concept of the virtual coach or the virtual community in this case. And I'm really curious to hear some best practices for folks out there. Right now we are all connected over Skype. It's free, we have cameras, we can see each other, all that kind of stuff. So it's really, really powerful. Is that what you guys suggest? Just get a Skype account and connect that way? Or what other best practices are you seeing today as it comes to this virtual connection?

I think that one of the things that we found is that it's unbelievably important no matter what video platform you use is to actually have the ability to see, see each other. And I'm not going to advertise for a platform. And in my own coaching, I actually use a whole wide variety. Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, life size. Sometimes in working with clients, you know, whatever they have available and they're comfortable with, I'll work towards. But it's an unbelievable game changer to be able to see people. And one of the things that I found for my coaching is that I know there's the statistic like something like 80% of communication is by non verbal means. And so when you're talking on the phone, you can hear words and you might be cognizant of tone of voice, but also you miss whether seeing if somebody is comfortable or uncomfortable because sometimes people will say to you, of course, yes, everything is fine, but if you actually see them, you can see it's not fine. The other thing, in using video and especially in the large format like our coaching community, everybody can see each other and it keeps people really engaged in the conversation because you don't just hear the words people are saying. You can see someone on the smaller screen. You can see they're really excited about the person who's speaking is saying, they're smiling, they're nodding, they're two thumbs upping. So that component is unbelievably important to create community.

Yeah, absolutely. I actually took a few screenshots of us today because I love just that, the visual of that community presence together and how that really played out.

Now, are there any suggestions or recommendations on how many people should connect virtually?

Well, I'll take this one. It's the same with leading any kind of group situation. When you're wanting to make sure that everyone is engaged and has time to share their voice. You want to have a group that's sized so that opportunity exists. And once you cross the threshold of more 12 or 13, it gets a bit more challenging, we found. So you know, you can. It depends on the situation. But for the type of community cohort that we've been experimenting with, we found that sort of keeping that under the 12 limit helps allow everyone to have time to share and provide their input and voice. Karen, what do you think?

I agree. And I think another best practice is that there's a structure and a format that everybody understands and of course you can modify as you go forward, but we do have a structure so that either Katie or I is the leader so that we can help keep on pace and make the segue from one section of the conversation to another section of the conversation. And everybody knows in advance that we're going to start out with reflections on the practice that we had from the week before. Then we're going to have a small teaching section and then we're going to have the portion of where people say what we're going to work on intentionally the next time. And I think that structure, which everybody knew and which they could see in a written portion, that was really important also for the community because then it wasn't willy nilly interactions, it was very intentional and people understood what to be talking about when they should talk. So I think it's really important to understand just like anything else, you should have that structure that people can know about beforehand.

So I'm curious to hear you mentioned that you do like a teaching lesson. Well, let's kind of. And I don't need you to say your exact process or anything like that, but just there's people listening right now who maybe work in a company and they got colleagues that work in you Know, different parts of the world and they want to try to maybe do something similar. And they have the technology again, Skype, Google Hangouts, whatever, any of these things that, that will work. But that's, that's just, that's the easy part. Like our teenage kids could do that, right? And they do. But what's the, what's the, is it like an hour? What do you suggest? Like an hour long, two hours long? What do you think works best from a timing perspective for this?

We found that an hour was what we experimented with and it really worked quite well. It gave enough time and again, that's with the limit of 12 or fewer people, so that everyone had time to speak, but not too much time. So no one was dominating that first half of the reflections. We really wanted to be short, tangible teaching moment, and then some more questions and discussion. And that really worked out quite well. And also if you go more beyond an hour, it can be challenging for people to find that consistent time on their calendar. So the hour really seemed to work quite well in the format that we had put forward for the structure.

So within that hour, then you mentioned some sharing, some teaching. Talk a little bit about the teaching. Is it just a topic of the day or do you have a curriculum for maybe the next 12 weeks? We're going to learn about this over the next 12 weeks and then you start chipping away at it. How are you approaching that?

Actually, one of the things that Katie and I were so excited about doing this is because for Katie and I, in a way, for ourselves, it's our own community of practice as well. Just a little bit of history. Katie and I knew each other through the Internet and we met last year at a conference in the Netherlands. And when we met each other in person, I think we instantly felt like, oh, what a fun connection. And our approaches are very similar, but actually they're different as well. And then Katie lives in California, I live in Chicago. And we started talking to each other about our different approaches. And both of us are business owners and it was nice to get together. We would talk about our approach, the different things we were doing. We would help each other. And we, in a way, had this virtual two person community of practice to start. It really made us think about, okay, thinking about the similarities and differences between our approaches, about purpose, about intention, about personal development through A3, about, you know, all of the creativity that I talk about. How could we put those two things together and create a series in which we both combined what we did and helped people to understand and to learn in very short segments. And that's actually really what we put together. So each of our six different sessions in this cohort had a focus that went together. Sometimes Katie led and I added. Sometimes I led and Katie added. So we were actually having our own community of practice all at the same time.

Yeah. You know, what was fun for us, too, is to build on the things that were. That we really have a shared fundamental philosophy on how to coach and develop people and ourselves. But to hear the nuances of different approaches that Karen has and the different approaches I've learned over the years in practice as well. And, you know, gets back to the quote we started off with that one plus one is way more than two. And I think that as combined, you know, it's part of what brings the community together as well. And building on every other one, everyone else's experiences as well.

Yes.

And you said the quote at the exact moment I was going to say, one plus one is way more than two.

That's so good. That's so good. So let's get tough here. I'm going to get tough on you guys now. It's not easy. Softballs all day long. You know how great this is, so. And I'm going to make it real tough because I already know one of your answers. I want to. I want to ask you about what's. What the challenges are, and I'm going to get. I'm going to take the first one from you, so you can't use it. Time zones and languages, obviously, is going to be challenge if we go worldwide with this, but what other challenges are there? There have to be more challenges. It's, you know, as compared to you. If we could wave a magic wa and everyone sitting in their room together, you know, like, what are the differences between this virtual community versus the being together in the same room or in the same coffee shop or whatever it might be.

Well, I'm going to say that I think one of the challenges is that really as the leader, the co leader of the community, it's very challenging to really also act as a community member. The people here who come from all around the world and who have all different experiences, and many of the people on the call were very seasoned practitioners themselves, is to say, okay, we're leading, but we're part of the community too. So how am I going to listen with, as I always say, open ears, open eyes, open mind, and an open heart, so that I am gaining just as much from the community as the rest of the community. And of course, when you see everybody on the line and Katie and I have set ourselves up, you know, we're the people who had everybody register. How do we make sure that we're also part of that community? So I think that's a challenge.

I'll build on that. I think it's less of a challenge as the distinction between an online community and just a community of practice. And just. It would be the same if we were facilitating an in person event with what Karen had shared was also just to establish that sense of trust and vulnerability between people. And it didn't end up being a challenge in our group this last time, everyone came and was immediately feeling very connected. But again, as a facilitator, that's always a challenge of how do you set up and create group dynamics so that people feel safe to be able to share, to be real? And what does that, what does that look like? And then how do you do that in a more remote setting? Going back to what we talked about earlier, having the visualization of the screens and seeing people's faces was invaluable in being able to do that. If it was just voice calls, we would not have established the same level of connection and sense of trust and community, for sure.

So, Katie, you're obviously very involved with Ame's consortia, right. You lead one out in the, in the Bay Area. Fantastic group. And Karen, have you been involved with any of those?

I have not.

Yeah, you need to. You need to start one in Chicago. See, there you go, Ame. I'm doing it. Is there? Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

All right. Oh, is it? Who leads that one?

Brian McKibben.

That's right. I should have known that. So, but contrast the two, Katie. You know, I remember I came and spoke at one of them last year, you know, and it was, it was awesome. I mean, my goodness, it was a huge crowd right at that one. But they're not always like that. But I remember going into lunch and everybody's sitting around, we're going around a table and everybody sharing, and everyone's clearly comfortable with one another. To your point, you know, that vulnerability there was not a. No, no issues there. Like, how would you contrast the dynamics to feel between that live consortia in these, in these, in these online communities?

Yeah. So there, there are a few distinctions in the, in the group and especially how you, what you experience, but the way the consortia of functions, it's not always the same group of people coming together. So again, we always have to do some of that team building and establishing trust with each other. But I think when people come with a shared purpose and intention for learning and development, that already sets that foundation. What we do more with this community of practice, and you could do it in person too, if geography was not barrier is having regular frequent sessions together, Whereas the meets maybe every six to eight weeks, depending on our agenda and our schedule. And there is specific practice at a personal level. And so having that anchored around frequent. We had our sessions weekly practices and tied to real key tangible intentions for practice and reflection helped us. And so that was just a little bit of a distinction in terms of how the groups were functioning. But certainly you could do the same thing with a consortia group or with an in person group in terms of a community of practice focused on some sort of personal development.

I'd also like to say that one of the things that I think was different because I often do facilitations of all different kinds of things in different places. In that case, in case, I think Ame I'm sure functions the same way is that people come from different places and they all come to one room. And it may be one organization space, but in this case, everybody participated remotely from their own space. And I would say many of the people were in their own home in a personal space, not necessarily a workspace. So you got to see not only the person, but of course the background of their space. So people would see me sitting in my studio, or in one case, someone was driving me in a car in the Netherlands.

Yes.

And so I think that when you see someone and they're obviously sitting in their home office, right? Or in their kitchen, or they're driving in their car, first of all, you make a real connection with them as a human being, not just as a worker or, you know, because they're in their own space. And oftentimes when people are in their own space, they're much more comfortable and willing to share and share things about who they are as a person and their life. Then if we all go to one space that's a workspace or that's a conference space, I think that creates a different level of connection as well.

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, one could make an argument that the more frequent, ongoing virtual connection could be even more authentic. I got my conference face on right now. I'm at the conference and I mean my conference mode. And that's not that it's bad, it's good. You know, it's just different, you know, and so I think there's a. There's. There's value for both, obviously. So is it what surprised you about this, about this online community?

I'm going to say the thing that was the biggest surprise for me was the speed and the depth of connection that people made. So after the first or second session, Katie and I came back to find out that people had actually contacted each other between sessions and had now set up coaching with each other.

They're cheating on the group.

And not cheating, supplementing.

That's great. That's great. That's great.

And although Katie and I had a hypothesis, of course, and a target that this is what we wanted to occur, I think that the speed and the depth by which that occurred and of course, because we could see people's faces and when we saw how they were talking about the coaching and the help that they had given and received from the other people, I think that just absolutely the depth of that was extremely surprising to me.

Yeah, it was fabulous. To go back to our. I'll build on that in a little bit of our just earlier conversation that I don't know if it's a huge surprise, but a little unexpected that people really brought their whole selves to the session. And while we were talking about coaching and maybe most people joined from a because they had a business interest in their professional lives about augmenting their coaching skills, many people were bringing in how they were using the skills and the techniques that we were talking about in their personal lives as well. And so I just think there's such value. We don't separate ourselves. Like we're one person at work, we're one person at home. We're our whole selves. And so it was really great to have that just that whole self approach to our coaching community as well.

So I gotta ask you, you're both very dynamic folks with really, really awesome, just friendly, powerful personalities that I love being around. What have you learned from each other?

Well, you know, as Karen said as soon as we met, gosh, it's almost been two years, Karen. Yes, it's been. We've just had this immediate connection. And in fact, I have gone and visited Karen in her house three times when I've had trips to the Midwest or through the Midwest. And this idea for these coaching communities came out of one of those visits to each other. Something I've learned from Karen and it's really been helped me shift a little bit in how I approach some of my coaching is the concept of short, frequent coaching sessions and to not be tied to a half hour or an hour and how that frequency and the shorter sessions of checking in can actually help people do much more of those rapid PDCA cycles on themselves. And so that's been something great that I've learned from Karen, not just from this experience, but through working with her over the last almost two years, I.

Would say from Katie. And I'm totally happy when I know that Katie is going to come and visit me. So much creative, you know, energy and fun together. I really thought about a lot and deepened my own practice on intentionality, which is something that Katie talks about all of the time. So I talk about purpose, I talk about setting targets, but then that absolute laser focus on intentionality every day, every hour, every minute. How am I using my time and reflecting back to say, okay, am I really intentional enough? And I think that that practice is an unbelievably important practice and that at the end of our reflections in today's, you know, last of our six coaching cohort sessions, people spoke so much about how much that focus on intentionality of practice. And, Ron, I actually think we spoke about this in one of our earlier podcasts about not just practice, but deliberate practice.

For sure. For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very good. Very good. So we've been talking a lot about what you guys have done, but I haven't explicitly asked you, and I know it's not your style, but I want you guys tell us a little bit more about the actual program that you guys have started. What's it called? I know. Well, you already mentioned it, K2C2. But talk a little bit about how does it work? If folks are interested in joining you, what do they do? Where do they go?

We're starting a new Cohort starting on September 5th for a series of six weekly sessions. We have an Eventbrite page set up, and we can send that to you to link to. And also on Karen's and my websites, we also link to it as well. So we can provide that information for you. And it's going to be very similar. We already have some folks enrolled and, you know, and we are really looking forward to continuing to build more community for this cohort and continue to expand the practice from our previous cohorts. Karen, what else do you want to add?

I'd like to add that as well as one of the things that we built in and created with this cohort, and we're going to continue with is as well as the weekly online hourly sessions, each cohort has their own WhatsApp group, so they can ask questions and communicate. And if they have questions in the middle you know, waiting is a waste. We don't want people have to wait. And we've also created a LinkedIn group afterwards. So after people have completed their online cohort, they can join the LinkedIn group and they can become part of a wider coaching community. Because as we said to people today, it's not the end, it's the beginning.

Yes. I also want to share that Karen and I have for this philosophy of right size pricing. So we don't want price to be a barrier for anyone to join the community and to join the community of practice. It's about practice, sharing, learning, growing together. So don't let that be a barrier to checking it out because.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I'm trying to do the math in my head on when this episode is going to come out and I'm, I'm worried that because we're several weeks ahead here, so I'm. But I, I guess even if, if that date has already passed and people are listening to this right now, you're going to do more than, than after September 5th. So even if they're listening to this after that, you know, these, these, these podcasts are evergreen. Right. Someone two years from now will be listening to it, so they can join the 82nd cohort or whatever.

Yes. We want to keep doing this. We had so much fun and the participants did too, so we're thrilled.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is part of Katie and my. We really wanted to be part of our ongoing practice because the more people who become part of that community, the more we can all help each other learn and grow. So this is just the beginning. So anybody who's listening to this, just check us out because we'd love to have you.

So we're going to put all the links to your websites and LinkedIn's and all this kind of stuff in our show. Notes. This episode's 281. Yeah, 281. So GembaPodcast.com, go to 281 episode 281 and we'll link to everything there. So, last thing, ladies, I know you both also do your own kind of individual things. Katie, I know you've got a trip coming up to Japan and was it May 2020? That's the next one that you're doing, May 2020.

And seats are more than 50% sold out already. So I'm super excited and I plan on continuing to do more. So even if you're listening this in the future, I plan on keeping it going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Karen, what do you got cooking?

Well, back to again, an earlier podcast, something you asked me about kindness. I have a very exciting announcement that my Love and Kindness Project foundation just received its official public charity designation from the Internal Revenue Service. So if you would like to go on and take a look at all of our love and kindness buttons and our book, Big Karma and Little Cosmo Help each Other. They're all@www.loveandkindnessproject.org. everything on that website is free for you to order. And if you'd like to make a donation to help us foster projects that create love and kindness in the world, we would absolutely love that.

Very cool. Very cool. All right, well, thanks again, ladies. I know this isn't won't be the last time that we talk, so it's always so fun talking to both of you, but having you together is even next level. So thank you for both coming on.

Thanks, Ron. It's always a pleasure.

Always a pleasure.

All right, and we'll talk to you guys soon. Take care.

Thanks. Bye.

Bye.

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