Week 37, 2020 - Chasing the last summer days

Three blissful long rides, two beautiful aha moments and never ending waves of work. I don’t remember much else of this week.

Week 36, 2020 - Homemade energy bars

I baked a big platter of energy bars for the first time. As I wait for them to cool, I feel a quiet sense of accomplishment from being able to “provide” for my future cycling and the symbolic act of preparing an energy source that will enhance my endurance for greater exploration.

I managed to get in three CrossFit workouts this week, too. Patting myself on the shoulder. I read a news article a few years ago that pointed out two indicators of economic downturn: people workout more, and they watch more Zombie movies. It makes sense, right? When things feel out of control, it feels good to invest in our physical bodies. We cannot escape our bodies, no matter how much technology advances. It’s also more straightforward than taking care of our mental state. The Zombie movies are an escapist fantasy where our own wits determine our survival; not the Boss or immigrants or rich people or whomever we feel has more control over our destiny than they should.

I’m not a 🧟‍♀️ 🧟‍♂️ fan but have plenty of other fantasies to escape to. And I’m committed to working out regularly to maintain a baseline of strength and endurance, even if I’m not hitting any PRs these days!

Conversations

• The difference between consulting, mentoring and coaching. What makes a good mentor, anyway?

• Are all sales processes the same if abstracted enough?

• If we keep asking “why”, will we arrive at the same existential answers regardless of the question we started with?

• What is an evolved form of online communities of practice?

Week 35, 2020 - Highs and lows

Infection numbers are rising again. We timidly go about the city, wondering what the next few months might look like. My week has been full of high highs and low lows. I’m tired, and tired of feeling tired.

Three hours later….
Weeknotes is a form of journaling. The power of journaling is that the process helps us reflect and reset intentions. I often find myself updating a weeknote hours after publishing it, adding an idea that the writing process helped me flesh out or an experiment that was triggered by a reflection.

This week’s entry was no different. After realizing that I’d let myself be down for too long, I went shopping, cooked a nice dinner, and prototyped a new calendar format. In the past month, I’ve been making tweaks to how I use Google Calendar in order to reclaim agency over my time. But having multiple calendars to separate work and personal activities, other people having permission to book such a big part of my day, food and health and hanging out with friends and family relegated to unclaimed time… it’s just not a great model to begin with. So I’m going to try something with a different mental model. Let’s see!

I’m grateful for this space that helps me figure things out. It’s more freeing to be writing here on my own website instead of Medium with awkward claps and pageview dashboards. I always seem to feel better, and often more energized, after writing and editing an entry 😊

Conversations

• What it means to advance the field of user research

• The role that music can play in expressing identity in a community

• What is it we care most in life and what are the challenges in investing in it

• How many bikes do I really need??

Week 34, 2020 - Starting four day work weeks

I’ve switched to a four day work week to have more time to think and write and cycle and rest. It’ll be Wednesdays off, which I chose by process of elimination.

• Monday - This would probably have the most negative impact on my teams and projects since I’d be MIA for a lot of planning activities.

• Tuesday - “Starting” on Monday and then stopping on Tuesday feels too abrupt. Tuesdays are also good for longer work sessions, so I prefer to keep it.

• Wednesday - Sweet spot!?

• Thursday - This would put a lot of pressure on the lone Friday to wrap up the week. I also tend to have workshops or user interviews on Thursdays.

• Friday - I’ve failed with a rhythm of every other Fridays off in the past, typically giving up in the middle of the week to work a five-day stretch instead. My current thinking is that it’s better to work Fridays but stop at a decent hour and start off the weekend on the right foot.

In the month leading up to flipping the switch, I made many arrangements to my workload and started being more conscious of where to draw the boundaries. The reactions of people I’ve told have been interesting. My colleagues’ reactions ranged from disinterest to “you deserve a break”. Friends have been universally curious and encouraging; some got really excited and helped me think through it while others shared their experiences. I hadn’t realized that so many had or have four day work weeks. It normalized the idea for me. I’m glad to receive guidance, too. I feel amazed to have this kind of agency, guilty when so many people are struggling in uncertain economic times, and relieved after more than a decade of grinding.

So this was the first week but it was a weird one being right after the holiday. I’d taken Monday off as an extension of the company break but was on Slack since it was everyone else’s first day back, started Tuesday at 7am to run an APAC-timezone workshop, took Wednesday off, put in fourteen hours on Thursday and then had a normal Friday. It was hard, with the upside being that it re-affirmed that I want to commit to a structural change.

Excited to see how next week goes. It’s almost la rentrée, too, so that momentum will carry me into September.

Conversations

• Late night discussions about love and what’s important in life

• Finding an artist that you seek to emulate in how they make artistic and life and business decisions

• How a fashion student makes sense of where they stand as they prepare to enter an industry grappling with how to balance expression, business and ethics

• Listened in on a wonderful EPIC roundtable event about “Regional Strategy in a Globalized World”

• Cheered on the Research Repositories project team during our best attended ResearchOps community Town Hall yet. So much good stuff, so much fun.

Week 33, 2020 - Writing and editing!

I added a Field notes from my Liberating Structures practice section to my website. It's not linked from anything and I haven't shared it publicly yet but it's live! And there are twelve structures already, which have gone through multiple rounds of editing.

Last week I'd started tapping notes in Roam but was drawn to move to the CMS once there were seeds for a few drafts. I spent a few days setting up "templates" while tweaking the words. Oscillating between content modeling <> content writing is an interesting process, and one that's become deeply familiar over the years. First it's exciting, then it feels like I over-engineered it, then I find ways to strip it back, and then things settle in.

(For a split second I considered setting up a Wordpress for the extensibility but no! Must not re-visit platform choices every time I have a content idea!)

And with some elegant information architecture decisions, you can do quite a lot with Squarespace's limited features. I'm happy with the form now, and the design investment has already paid off in the last few entries. With the constraints in place - because that's what templates are - thoughts are faster to come, easier to pull together, and the production is a breeze.

So the pages are accessible to all but no one actually accesses them, and I really enjoy the freedom of that. Like these weeknotes :P

Week 32, 2020 - In the studio

I’m looking forward to my little summer break next week as punctuation (to use Liberating Structures parlance) between month-long marathons of being consumed in projects and other matters.

A few thoughts on what comprises a studio practice.

• A dedicated place (in and out)

• A regular rhythm of time, with a clear start and stop to each session (again, in and out)

• A structure for experimentation and reflection

• Ying activities outside of studio yang time

• A broader practice into which studio time feeds

• Peers who share in the time, space and ethos of the studio as part of their own practice

• Visitors, who are invited into it with intention or not at all

The boundaries between home life, work and social activities evaporated as physical boundaries were rendered null. These crossings, whose transition included donning new clothes and hence slipping into a different expression of who we are, played such a big part of how we mentally switched from one mode to another. These cues are muted or gone, and that structural shift is what makes time feel like Groundhog Days of a very long slog of a day.

It makes the gift of having someone masterfully hold space for us to be in a studio-like mode more valuable than ever. Initiatives like Writer’s Hour, Cave Time and Connection Club tap into precisely that need. Existing tools are often used to set up this kind of space, making them look like yet another online meeting or event. Get a newsletter to be notified, sign up on Eventbrite, log into Zoom. But that similarity is deceptive because this kind of initiative goes beyond “moving online”. Beyond being dragged into trying the virtual equivalent and saying with astonishment “hey, it’s possible!” and a breezily optimistic “it might even be better!”.

Because it’s a gift, our readiness to receive it determines how it’s brought to life. And in this case, it’s the discipline to show up and continue showing up. Once we step into that space, we become part of what holds space for the practice to be, well, practiced. It simply doesn’t work if someone is waiting to be fed content, to be told what to do, to be served.

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

Week 30, 2020 - Time is so elastic

The weeks are slipping by, sometimes unnoticed and sometimes violently. I’ve developed a very active journaling practice in the last month and feel ready to start with the public weeknotes again. It is a pleasure to write here.

I’ve been thinking a lot about collective memory and totem poles and stories. I believe there is a deep need for facilitated sensemaking of our collective experience [whatever unit that may be] and to be intentional about abstracting and recognizing its value, collecting artifacts for future re-visiting, and deciding what to carry on into the future. During my last few thorny projects, I yearned for a documentarian or archivist to have accompanied the journey to help us make sense and document the struggles and breakthroughs. We cannot do that _and_ run the project at the same time.

It’s been hard to focus. After more than a decade of client work, I can make myself do it for the sake of delivering at the speed and quality that I aspire to, but for everything else, it’s really, really hard. Getting out on my bike and writing helps, and I’m resolved to do more of those activities.

Week 29, 2020 - Beautiful tools

My workload exploded two months ago and it’s been relentless. I had the good sense to start using the office again, after a period of thinking I could continue working from home. No, it’s much healthier to have a physically separate space, with a few familiar faces.

What’s on my mind right now: Indian clubs! One of those those things I’ve always meant to try but managed to keep forgetting. I got myself a handmade wooden pair of 1lb clubs. It’s been so much fun. Even my noob moves have had immediate effect on upper body mobility. There’s definitely a learning curve to achieve flow, one that I’m really curious about, and gain a sharper recognition of where my body is in space.

Most interestingly, the clubs are beautiful. They look like art objects and they are so soothing and comfortable to hold. I keep picking them up because they’re just so nice, and the heft and weight distribution in my hands naturally leads to a few swings. That’s never happened when I had a kettlebell in my bedroom. And my jump ropes are also very nice but it doesn’t prompt me to pick them up. I just appreciate them when I do.

So at the moment I’m fascinated with the clubs, both in and out of my hands.

Week 17, 2020 - On meet-ups moving online

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!