Hi, my name is Tomomi.

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.

It’s been an incredibly long week, and I’m dumbstruck by how flattened I feel by the sheer volume of work that I put in. But it’s been a great lesson on how critical it is to be able to enjoy time spent together as a team, as a rock-solid foundation of any effort we put in. And there are the moments spent together on actual work, and the moment spent in between - the breaks, the lunches, the chit chat on our chat apps, and that last drink where we don’t talk about work.

Being flown in for workshops is a surreal experience. You’re fully immersed in a bubble, partly of your own making but as an outsider. After a flurry of hard work, intense focus and a slew of unhealthy habits, you drop back into the regular programming at home. A bit like parallel universes. I have multi-day workshops for two different clients in two different countries and it’s giving me a bit of whiplash.

I can’t write about the client assignments so let me record a few thoughts about a book instead. This week I read “From Contempt to Curiosity - Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate” by Caitlin Walker, the originator of Systemic Modelling. It’s the Clean Language approach applied to organizational contexts - a dialog-based process that unearths and then helps us shape the metaphors that underpin our mental models.

It’s a wonderful book and I read it in one sitting, then went back through it again through Kindle Highlights. It’s great to follow the journey of how different hypotheses and experiments over 15 years build upon each other. More of our consulting work should have a stronger red thread - it’s definitely something I want to be more intentional about. The tools seem to be quite rigorous and actionable, so I’m looking forward to digging into further material to see what I can put in practice.

I’ll quote the opening and closing statements here:

“This book is about attention. It explores how the quality of the attention we pay to ourselves, to the stories we hear, to the people we meet and to the world at large, profoundly affects the things we are able to think and therefore the things we are able to do.”

“We have an approach for creating the time and space that we need to connect and to collaborate - a process for inspiring capability in ourselves, and in one another, to move away from contempt, towards curiosity, compassion and love. So that more of us are able to be at our best, much more of the time.”