2025 Week 6 Update

Accountability as a Productivity Tool, Challenges of Working Asynchronously, and Diving into Sense Making

Topics

• Accountability Spaces for Mutual Support in Getting Stuff Done

• Working Async with a Distributed Crew

• Diving Deeper into Sense Making

Accountability Spaces for Mutual Support in Getting Stuff Done

This week, we continued the experiment with virtual co-working. We hosted an accountability space with the ODIN Community throughout the week with people coming in and out to participate. The basic format was start the sessions with a statement of your goals for the next 45 minutes, wait for everyone to share their intentions, and then jump into quiet, focused work. Sometimes we would state intentions verbally, other times, just in chat. After 45 minutes, someone would usually break into the silence, announcing that the time was up, and we would each go around and talk about what we accomplished and got done.

For me, it was such a wonderful experience to sit in a space where other people were quietly working and providing support for me to focus and get done what I committed to at the start of the session. I found myself running 5 or 6 rounds of this on some days, other days getting in one or two in between my meetings. I think I got more done this way than I usually do because I had fewer distractions, felt accountable to get done what I committed to, and the quiet, yet powerful support of the community hanging out in the space with me doing their own work along side me.

Interested in running your own? Checkout our playbook for Accountability Spaces. If you want to join the ones ODIN is running, take a look at our Discord Server space and drop in, no commitment needed.

Working Async with a Distributed Crew

This week I also had the pleasure of focused “swarm working” on the Membership and Community Committee budget for Intersect alongside 6 other committee members. We were all trying to get a budget put together good enough to serve as a starting point for a conversation with the community on what we should spend money on in the Community Grants and Education space. It was really interesting work as the committee members working on the budget are spread around the world, most have full-time jobs, and we all contributed where we could when we had time.

Being distributed across time zones, there was maybe an hour or two when a few of us would have some overlap and we could chat almost in realtime, giving each other feedback and comments on different ideas and topics. The other times, one of us would take the general thread of sentiment and try working out how that might look like in a shared Google document. Then we set it aside and waited for comments as other timezones woke up and started looking at what was done.

We used polls in Discord to hold votes that looked often like:

"Do you agree with v3.9.1 as an improvement over version 3.8?" and there would be a detailed change log so we could all see what was updated and changed or deleted and be able to focus on what was different from the previous versions. When we hit a 2/3 majority of approval, we could move on.

Sometimes there would be quicker feedback and discussions and more changes would happen and we would abandon pervious changes in order to focus on a new version incorporating some insight or re-organization of categories or some other major change. Sometimes we abandoned a dead-end approach and reverted to a previous version and kept iterating on that one. It was a bit chaotic, but there was always some progress being made over time.

I think what made this asynchronous, distributed work feel productive was the commitment of each person involved to read the changes, make comments, and to vote on the various polls. It required commitment to attention and action.

It also worked because there were at least two people who felt empowered and motivated to make the changes being discussed and put them up for consideration. You need people who can do the hard work of acting, just as much as you need people to think and participate in the conversations.

It was an interesting back and forth and push and pull of 7 different people in many different time zones. I sighed a breath of relief when we hit a version, got it approved, and then there was no other conversation or changes proposed for a couple of days. We arrived at something everyone felt was good enough for now, and safe enough to try.

Diving Deeper into Sense Making

One topic that is popping up in a number of different areas is sense making, or more specifically, how we're losing the ability to do this well, and how it is a critical skill that is needed to make good decisions in this challenging VUCA era.

I've started some research on the topic and wanted to share the first video that I've started listening to from Daniel Schmachtenberger:

It's almost 2 hours in length, so it's an investment of time, but I think it will be important for me to really get a good handle on this topic. This video is the first in a series of videos on the topic, and I am thinking of bringing this up as an area of focus for the ODIN study group to dive deeper into and explore how we can engage in sense making better as a community and what that looks like in practice.

If this topic if sense making interests you, please let me know. I'd love to exchange notes and thoughts about it and explore how we can collectively get better at it.