Week 1, 2020 - Clean and white

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.

Week 52, 2019 - Tokyo

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.

Week 51, 2019 - Closing up shop

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?

Week 50, 2019 - Staying close to home

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.

Week 49, 2019 - Let’s take the time

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.

Week 48, 2019 - One last drink

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.

Week 47, 2019 — Towards curiosity

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."

Week 46, 2019 - Why walk on your hands?

I have three multi-day workshops for different clients in different countries with completely different topics in the space of four weeks, and this week was an in-between week among that intensity.

I’ve kept it really low key, enjoying the quiet time while charging my batteries. I played around with a new furniture layout in the living room which took me on a path to a new online training program just because there was more space. A three day trial turned out to be a lot of fun and I already seeing gains expressed through my regular CrossFit routine. So I’m going to give the foundational eight week program a serious go, and am looking forward to the process immensely.

Past attempts at building a home training regime have been superficial and fleeting (in hindsight) but things feel different this time. My heavy travel schedule blocks me from consistently working out and it’s high time I did something about that - bringing my running shoes for an occasional run isn’t cutting it.

The idea of having fun by working on different movements and discovering what your body can do… I don’t think I ever really understood that. I’m a gym rat that likes to get in a good workout in a group setting with a coach and then leave happy. But the program talks about building a mindful practice and it’s not yoga or mobility and I’m already seeing results so… wow it could be just what I needed but didn’t know I did!

This coincides with a focus on handstand walking in my gym’s programming. In the past I’d had a hard time really getting into working on these movements, preferring the cardio or weightlifting movements. But thinking about play vs practice vs perform modes has helped me be in the right mindset when tackling this kind of session. Having this range of modes and being able to intentionally switch one on feels like it could unlock a different phase of my training.

Week 45, 2019 — Searching for red threads

It’d been months since we’d caught up, and we had a meandering conversation, the best kind that webs and flows between all kinds of topics. Through it, he casually put his finger on a common thread between several of my current and past interest.

How is knowledge captured and passed on?

It’s information architecture, it’s design research, it’s databases, it’s knowledge management, it’s communities, it’s workshops... it’s stories, and it’s creating the space for them to emerge and the space for them to them to be listened to.

There’s a string here that needs to be pulled and pulled and pulled. Wow.

A fresh start?

I closed the account for the server where my Wordpress site lived. Accidentally, thinking it was something else. Most of my Weeknotes, and almost a decade of sporadic blog posts have disappeared.

I'm speechless.

But it's... fine, actually. Time for something else.