Week 31, 2020 - Listening to signals
We’ve had heat waves in France this week, which leads to a dampening of personal energy levels for conservation purposes, whether we’re aware of it or not. The mood stays high enough, though. It’s harder to be down when the sun is so bright, so I tend to be stay in a lazy, good mood.
Lately, I’m more sensitive to how the physical environment influences my outlook and clarity of thought. There’s the brightness of the sun, the freshness of the wind, how the air feels on my body, the level of noise and din around me…
And that helps to listen to signals from my physical self, to feel its (my) preparedness for what’s to come next and gauge how best to go about it. The body can be more truthful than the mind, especially when the mind seems to always be flopping like a desperate fish between short-circuiting or going haywire, in its attempt to process and make sense of all that’s going on.
On that vein of listening more closely to signals from within, the more I journal the easier and more pleasant it is to continue these weeknotes, and I find myself itching to write articles, next.
Rundown of happenings and thoughts:
Put in motion a few blocks for the rest of the year, to decrease my working hours and focus to a series of projects instead of spread across multiple clients
Facilitated two scoping sessions for a redesign project of a global customer support site
Hosted two open discussions about the future of mobility to come up with a new way to communicate a client’s value proposition. Next step: synthesize the ideas into a few models and catch phrases
Wrapped up Covid related content production for an app update that’s slated to go live next week. Clacking away at Wordpress for a few hours, with a workflow and bag of tricks built over almost two decades of publishing content on the web, discretely making IA decisions and tweaking a word here and there to strengthen the editorial… This kind of work tends to get pushed “down” the ladder or thrown over the fence to someone removed from the project, and this devaluation has a direct impact on the experience. And being anchored in this kind of work-work instead of simply managing the people and processes is so important to me. I was quite gleeful that afternoon!
A bit of progress to pull together a few third party software pieces to build a customer insights platform. I’m looking forward to designing a study and intake process that’ll happen in September, with an eye towards disseminating findings to be incorporated into product decisions in November, and then overseeing design updates in October… This scope is really interesting, it’s rare to be able to flex the multiplication of research x design x ops x leadership capabilities as part of the same project.
Kicked off a new project to understand the impact of WFH at a client org. It’ll be my third project conducting qualitative research on this topic, and I find that digging into the shifts in operations to be such a rich way to understand underlying team dynamics and management styles.
A few minutes of swinging Indian clubs every morning or night. I’ll watch some videos over the weekend to pick up a few new moves to incorporate next week
Re-started experimentation to expand my range with Liberating Structures. Very keen to achieve enough mastery to be able to sequence them over the next two months
Attended a few hours of a Wardley map conference. I really like that there is a community here, with its own norms and stories and a center of gravity in Simon Wardley. Learned a few new perspectives but man, attending online conferences is tough.
Helped out with a ResearchOps event which was an injection of inspiration and a reminder that there are many brilliant people out there doing similar work, facing similar challenges.
A lovely meandering lunch with a friend where we unraveled what we wanted to do next
Cycled my most frequently repeated route - a well-paved 30km piston along the river to a forest park - followed up by a half beer and half pizza. A perfect Saturday afternoon.
Made a big trip to the Korean/Japanese supermarket to stock up. There’s been a few too many delivered dinners of late.
An exploration of new flavors at a satisfying dinner at a Georgian restaurant