Hi, my name is Tomomi.

It’s been another quiet week, not bad from a productivity standpoint considering the level of hay fever symptoms that can put me out of action on a bad day.

Most professional events have moved online, and it’s been interesting to see what happens when geographical constraints are gone. I’ve been attending about one every two weeks since the confinement began, which is at least double my usual pace.

The remote nature of events gives us access to more free content than ever before, and from the comfort of home, the barrier to trying an event is considerably lower. It’s exciting to be more adventurous with choosing topics and communities of interest, or luck out with a free talk by a known speaker who is unlikely to visit our city.

It comes with the “liberty” to be late, not show up, have dinner while attending the event, or quietly drop out if something better comes along. The flip side is that the chances of establishing a deep-enough connection with someone to follow-up on, even if it’s an encounter at a later event, is much lower.

From a speaker’s point of view, the commodotization of content can be tough. With boundaries of an audience - who they are, why they’re here, what they expect - evaporating, we need to put more care in setting expectations before we attempt to surpass them. It takes more work to understand an audience, and then to hold their attention.

I believe the biggest changes are for community organizers. If I invest in my meetup as a way to contribute to my local scene and my place within it, what is my motivation to organize an event that anyone from around the world can join? If first-timers become more numerous than my regulars, how does it affect the shape of the space I try to hold? What is it I’m actually asking of, and offering to my speakers? If the long-timers can’t have casual-yet-intimate conversations over drinks, where will they go instead? Who are “we” and why are we doing this?

It’s time to re-visit the nuances of what we mean by building community. Having the technical and facilitation expertise to run online events is just one piece of the puzzle. Honestly, organizing events takes too much effort to simply move existing activities online without having chewed on these questions. I fear that community organizers will burn out faster than before, as it becomes more difficult to tangibly feel the fruits of our efforts.

My accelerated experiences as an attendee has been invaluable in teasing out a point of view for these three roles. With Design Research Tokyo, we haven’t run any events since pausing planning for a physical one in February but I think we’re close to re-opening with something that’s designed to be - dare I say - online-first. In parallel, I’ve been working with Dave towards an event next Thursday for the ResearchOps Berlin community called “Using the Research Skills Framework”.

Meetups can take on a wide spectrum of flavors but its key concern is always grounded on the quality of connections established, for which the underlying principle remains the same: Listen carefully to the signals coming from the vast and increasingly noisy networks around us, and tune what we ourselves send out.

p.s. The wider DRT audience includes plenty of (?) young mothers whose household schedules aren’t compatible with coming out to a multi-hour event after hours. Offering babysitting services is beyond our reach but perhaps a shorter online event could be the right mechanism that brings learning opportunities to them. Was one of the first things that we discussed internally!

Week 16! Since my last entry 12 weeks ago, I had a string of travel and then COVID-19 and confinement hit and now, here we are, painfully transitioning into another kind of era.

Of those twelve weeks, four have been in “confinement” at home in Paris. I’m one of those fortunate to be able to stay at home, where we swing between fighting against anxiety and fighting against inertia. Time feels like it’s stretching and contracting at once.

It seems as good as time as any to dig myself out of this surreal limbo state. I won’t backfill the weeknotes, but simply re-start.

I spent a few days in Ningbo and then Shanghai for a small family reunion. Wow, it’s been more than a decade since I’ve had a chance to visit mainland China and I was super curious to experience first-hand their mobile technology.

I found it’s the type of convenience that comes with a feeling of brittleness. What happens when the tech fails? Getting locked out of a WeChat account, losing access to an Alipay account etc. would grind your daily life to a halt. The un-traceability of cash and paper tickets is a nice option that I’d not really thought about before. Overall, the taste I got for centralized transactions was fascinating and disconcerting in equal measures. It’s a parallel universe to the Western-centric digital world that I reside in, and the majority of the population from either side don’t particularly seem to be concerned about that.

Sadly, it wasn’t the best timing to be exploring China. We made the decision to cut the trip short amidst mounting uncertainty about the new corona virus.

Reading:

• 直観の経営 「共感の哲学」で読み解く動態経営論 by 野中 郁次郎, 山口 一郎 (link) - I hadn’t realized that Ikujiro Nonaka of SECI model of knowledge dimensions fame was still a prolific author! This book is about the philosophy of empathy, written with a phenomenologist.
• 引き抜き屋 1 鹿子小穂の冒険 and 引き抜き屋(2) 鹿子小穂の帰還 by 雫井 脩介 (link) - Skimmed through this novel about executive head hunters, to try something different. Shallow and unrelateable characters but interesting tidbits about this industry.

This was the second half of my time in Tokyo, which I typically start by longing to go home. Health deteriorates, sleep quality is in the pits and energy is low. But activities are full-on, interesting opportunities continue to present themselves and I somehow find pockets of time to connect yet a few more dots. It’ll pay off in the following months.

Ended the week by going to the neighborhood library to pick up a few books for next week. They’ve rebuilt it from the ground up and it’s an amazing community space with everyone from babies to grandpas.

Client work

I took part in a user research project and spent a few afternoons designing a dashboard for another, so I feel grounded in practice. Too many workshop-only projects and short consulting gigs will dull the sword. Gotta keep doing the doing.

[Projects] Design Research Tokyo

Ran a ResearchOps 101 event, building on activities by the ResearchOps community. The prep was more stressful than I’d anticipated and so I was especially heartened to get positive feedback from an audience that I’ve come to know fairly well. To be continued when I’m back home in Paris, so that other communities can organize introductory events about operationalizing research. It was a blast to go out with the DRT organizer team two weeks in a row :)

[Projects] Secret upcoming project

Got together with Sachiko to feel out the edges of what we want to do and how we might go about doing so.

Reading:

コミュニケーション力を引き出す 演劇ワークショップのすすめ by 平田オリザ (link) - I was keen to learn more about how workshops are utilized in stage theater, especially by Hirata Oriza who uses them extensively to work out his scripts. This book offered a fresh perspective on tackling typical org culture topics like encouraging communication and creativity by using theater activities as a tool. Unsure how much I’ll be able to apply it myself but it was interesting how sensitive he is to how participants react to certain situations. Negativity, shyness, being boisterous or rebellious - these are all human reactions that need to be incorporated into the dynamics of the room. I’ve long stopped using the lens of “difficult participants” as I find it self-centered but Hirata takes it to another level with the normality in which he anticipates and rolls with these reactions.

I had a strong first week at work, with lots of hearty discussions and a string of lunches and dinners with friends and peers. I was introduced to about a dozen people whom I’m sure I’ll meet again sometime. On Saturday I attended a talk event about the popularization of philosophy as a current business trend, which added a few books to my wish list. Afterward, I visited a colleague’s home to see the kids, had dinner with another, and ran into two people I knew on the street. Feeling right at home in Tokyo!

[Projects] Design Research Tokyo:

• I had the chance to participate in a DRT book club event for once, instead of just helping to plan it from afar! Having the space to geek out about stuff is such an adrenaline boost.
• Worked out rough plans for February and March events.

An auspicious start to the new year at the northern tip of the main island of Japan, with good food, good view and even better company.

[Projects] Researcher Skills Framework:

• Worked out the outline of an upcoming IxDA talk with Dave
• Sent in another conference workshop proposal with Dave

Reading:

• Sam Ladner: Mixed Methods: A short guide to applied mixed methods research (link) - For an upcoming DRT book club. I need to finish it up next week and work on slides for my assigned section. Great to get the book version of the masterclass webinar I took last year.
• The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation
  by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless (link) - LS has been on my list of things to investigate for a few years, and I finally started reading the book. It’s way more than the descriptions of workshop activity patterns (structures) that I was expecting! Relevant to an ongoing client project, so I’m inspired to take this to the next step.

I’m in Tokyo for the winter holiday! Plenty of time to catch up with friends and family, eat good food and finish up the year.

I’m glad to be doing these week notes. They’re not as in-depth as they used to be but they’re actually getting written on a weekly basis which feels more important. I plan to continue jotting down some thoughts and adding a photo every week in the coming year.

Reading:

• Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard (link) - I finished my sister’s copy in a few days, great food-for-thought as the question of organizational purpose becomes more and more critical in our business.

An in-between week, as we work towards wrapping up the year while trying to conserve enough energy to get us there. Paris is less festive than previous years due to the gravity of the nation-wide strikes which continue through the holidays. Making our way through the city means a lot of walking, and walking through tense demonstrations and a lot of traffic. People are getting by but I feel there’s a collective sign of relief to welcome Christmas family time. I’m also glad to do a Big Clean and head to Tokyo, where there will be a much stronger sense of closure as we prepare to greet the next decade.

I’ve got a few personal projects in the queue for the next two weeks. I’m happy with the books I’ve read over the past month but it’s time to switch from consuming to producing mode.

Unrelated, a recent realization: I revel in the emergence phase of a project. I am elated bouncing off ideas with someone and the quality of thinking correlates to my overall happiness with a project. I knew that already. What I hadn’t realized was that I get really testy when the fragile space needed for that work is not respected. And I get despondent when I don’t have a buddy to explore with. Our triggers are our triggers, might as well know them?

It’s been a quiet week. No travel, no workshops, no deadlines.

I spent a big chunk of my week writing a project overview deck, which sounds unexciting but was actually quite important. A meaty piece of content that captures in one place what we mean to achieve, a statement piece that a project could be rallied around, which we could refer back to again when things seem unclear. It took a lot out of me but I’m glad it exists now. Projects need its purpose to be articulated and shared, and it’s too often replaced by some kind of project plan. But people don’t rally around a plan.

This week started off with two long days of user research in the UK, which both shortened and lengthened the feeling of the week! I took it easy on Wednesday so by the time Friday rolled around, I wasn’t too sure which day of the week it was….

First hand field research experience is critical to a project member’s ability to contribute and perform. Spending time in the genba gives us the anchor to be truly useful, and not let ourselves get caught in the follies of egos and organizational matters.

I’m making my way through “Nonviolent Communication: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values” by Marshall B. Rosenberg and “Clean Approaches for Coaches” by Marian Way. The former was because more than a few friends around me in Paris have gotten into NVC, and the different parts of the story they told over the years culminated into a strong interest. The latter is a continuation of my exploration of Clean Language after reading about Systemic Modelling, and combining my interest in pursuing coaching skills.

So it was a bit of a coincidence to start on two books that present approaches that are complimentary to one another - as far as I can currently tell, anyway. They both have similar starting points, in separating an observation from an often-emotional reaction, in order to analyze the underlying intention or need behind the observed action. Another similarity is the focus on spoken language as the key medium or material to play with.

I think the meta-learning here is about slowing down. Take in the present for a moment (or two!) before charging ahead, which typically results in hurting others but also ourselves. And to let that more steady response increase the likelihood of circumstances moving in our favor.

The idea of clarifying intent is very interesting to me because design is all about intent. So I’m hoping that after I’ve swam in these ideas for a while more, the connections with design will emerge and I’ll be able to synthesize them more deeply.