Category: Writing

With our home lives “leaking through our screens” as my friend Alex says, we catch glimpses of the humanity of the people we work with.

During a meeting today, one of my colleagues had his boisterous kids in the background deciding to wrestle. His Dad voice didn’t quite work, probably because they knew he was distracted. He muted himself on our meeting, got up and tried a louder/sterner (?) voice with them. Some of us with older kids gleefully remembered the times we went through, and joked about the fact that it was someone else’s kids as the current center of attraction.

Help quickly arrived in the form of a superhero, Mum, who seemed to magically quieten the two cute brats. She bundled them away from behind Dad’s microphone.

My colleague continued with his presentation while his wife got the boys to make up just outside line of camera sight. When she walked past him, she gently, tenderly, brushed his shoulder. And for the briefest of moments, I heard his voice soften.

If they’re anything like my wife and I – and I’m certain they are – both of them were able to recognise and acknowledge the help without making a big show of it.

I’m getting some practice (and requests) to do presentations lately. They’re all virtual, and mixing up the type of content has meant I have the ability to craft a story that’s holding the audience’s engagement for about 30 minutes.

What’s interesting out of this experience is how few people actually reach out after the session to connect or say anything at all, particularly when they are one Teams message away.

What if, after every session that I chose to attend where I had not seen the presenter before, I sent an acknowledgement of their effort, and the messages I took away?

Funnily enough, the opportunity to present arose just now to a group of grads. Building a network, and working on communication / presentation skills are the topics I’ve been asked to talk on. This will be great practice, and I will have to connect with a very different audience than the ones I usually speak to. Exciting!

Met my team for lunch this afternoon, in person, after 4 months of lockdown and seeing everyone through a screen. It was a joyous affair – every single one of these people I would make time for even if we didn’t work together. The sentiment is reciprocal: even someone who no longer works with us joined us for a meal in a public park. We spent nearly 3 hours, talking, ideating, and rebuilding social capital that CoVID has inevitably eroded.

I used the commute to make some headway into the suggested readings of the course I’m doing. While I still dislike the commute (how on earth have I done it for a decade?), the empty carriage and the time-box (two boxes to contain me!!) meant I could get through discrete pieces that I had been putting off reading.

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Swimming lessons have also recommenced, which means I have the ability now to write this while I wait for the lessons to finish. I remember this rather vaguely too – the noise of the pumps and water sloshing in the background while the instructors yelled over it at the kids to perfect this stroke or to kick stronger and harder.  It has been a long time for sure!

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Writing a hundred – or two hundred – words is not too hard when I tackle multiple things. Writing the same with focus on ONE idea is a little more challenging. That is really evident when I have a lot on my mind: zoning out of all those, and zoning in on a single idea is something I want to get better at.  Most of the work writing I’ve done recently has required me to shrink the idea down to its quintessence because people who read it “don’t have time”, and inevitably, it turns out to be false economy.  They ask more questions and I spend more time explaining.

 

 

School reopened today. And with it, all the challenges of the adults getting up earlier  😀

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Identifying problems are hard. Meetings with several people trying to define the problem makes it exponentially (?) harder. Without the tools, space, discipline, and agreed principles of engagement, might as well give up.  And yet, I see many episodes of this happen every day, multiple times a day.  It feels like people do this so they can keep themselves feeling busy, or important. Activity over accomplishment is the mantra. Exhausting.

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HT @John Naughton’s newsletter today had a link that caught my eye. The math is way beyond me for sure, but the phrase ‘getting your ducks in a row’ has a new meaning!

From the “Journal of Fluid Mechanics“:

“Simulations reveal that ducklings swimming in a single-file formation behind the parent can achieve a wave-riding benefit whereby the wave drag turns positive”

 

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Serendipitously, I caught this mother duck and her three ducklings walking back from their little swim this afternoon. No, they weren’t in a row 🙂

 

Nancy Duarte’s company has some wonderful content they publish on their blog.  I watched two of their videos on ideas to present virtually: Content, Design and Delivery. Short, practical and well produced, they were definitely worth the time invested. I have Content listed to watch later.

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This weekend we got to see some of our friends in person after nearly 18 months. It was simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Learning how to socialise again is important – and tough, particularly after being used to the introverted way of life I have thoroughly enjoyed.

Kids, on the other hand, took much less time to test and engage. Oh, to have a child-like ability to connect and forget.

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There were few people on the beach on our walk – schools reopen tomorrow and the freedom-celebrating crowds of the last couple of evenings had all returned to their abodes to prepare perhaps. Low tide meant we could walk over the rocks and take in the sight of waves crashing on the rocks; and take in some surf in the wind. Got home, & my daughter smelt me from afar to say “you smell like fish” 🙂

The excitement of getting a kite to fly quickly turned into a desire for a drone for the young lad.

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This morning, my teenage daughter asked for help with her pitch for a film documentary on information. We watched a couple of videos together – the Carlota Perez talk from last night, a part of the Information author James Gleick’s talk at Google, and the chapter on Money by Gary Gensler during his MIT Blockchain course.

Money, in as much as it moves around as information over the internet, is a line of thought that is novel for my daughter, and likely for many adults. Blockchains and bitcoins and cryptocurrencies might all sound too cryptic, until we realise that three discoveries of the 21st century are building blocks of an entirely new set of lifestyles for us today: the atom, the gene and the bit.  

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Atomic Habits is a wonderfully practical read, and while I’m going through my first reading, I’ve already recognised some of the ideas in there as what I’m applying to my 100-day dailies experiment. I will explore this at more length over the next few days.

 

Never mind whatever else is happening in the world, the waves still crash up on shore, leave something behind, take something, and if I’m observant enough, allow a lot of reflection of several kinds.

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I had two conversations today that were inspired me. The first one was with a colleague who has a hearing impairment, and has an incredible story of not just overcoming it, but thriving despite it. I am helping him craft his story and it was invigorating to see his excitement at the opportunity to share his authentic story in a few weeks. The second was with a person on another continent who I had expressed my gratitude for sharing their story in a very public forum. They were kind enough to accept my invite for a call, and we had a wonderful time sharing ideas and books.

While the technology to connect everyone of us on the planet exists, I think that the fear of connecting with another human stops us from actually doing so. And when we get over ourselves and our fears, there are truly wonderful opportunities to learn at any time.

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After nearly 18 months of t-shirts in this world of Working From Home (or Sleeping At Work), I tried on a formal shirt today. It fit, somewhat too snugly in some places, and just right in others.  Walked out into the living room, & was immediately greeted with “Nice, where are you going?”

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Not a bad view, on our evening walk at the local beach.

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Everyone has opinions. They’re based on experiences, biases, partial information, total bullshit, etc etc.  By themselves, they generally cause little harm to the collective. Until of course, they’re brought together under conditions of duress. Like after a few drinks. Or sometimes, a workshop.

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I had several strokes of good fortune today. People came to my rescue in ways I hadn’t expected. Others pointed out my ‘super-power’ and how they wished they had it. It allowed me to slow down and think about the things that make it seem easy, but are actually a few micro-skills I learnt over time working seamlessly and at great pace without me even thinking about them. James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, helped me frame this better as a habit – a sequence of behaviours that is automatic. ‘A’ urged me to talk about this in one of the sessions I organise. The procrastinator in me screamed out “NO”.

Some clouds have a darker side to them but like much of the country now, there is light in sight. Including at our household, where all members aged  15+ are now vaccinated.

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A friend and colleague shared a 2002 HBR article today titled Make Your Values Mean Something. Among other things, it made me reflect on how scarce authentic appreciation of a fellow human for their efforts appears to be in the work world.  The larger corporates I’ve come across seem to mandate that people thank each other, even a target to meet. There’s often an inability to acknowledge by the powers that be (who likely have never used it themselves) that the systems ostensibly designed to keep this thanking business together are so full of friction that few use it, leading to more mandates. The loopy loop goes on.

Upon reflection, I have found it easier to say something in a meeting than to do it in writing. I’ve also let the memory of the best thank you exercise we did together as a team fall into the recesses of my mind.  It was a simple exercise: pick any one person in the team that you were thankful to for something they did for you, and tell it to them in writing. Everyone got multiple mails. Everyone without exception, expressed how valued, even loved, they felt to read the words from their colleagues _____. The feeling of being on top of the world despite being in the thick of the lockdown lasted weeks.

Why don’t we do it more often? Why do I not do it more often?

The earthy red on the boat stands out – almost as much as the piers next to it.

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I’ve always wondered if everyone has a desire to be doing impactful or at least useful work. Over the course of many hundreds of conversations, I have come to believe that it is true, perhaps with my biased sample. It’s also becoming apparent to me in those conversations that the effort involved in such meaningful work throws some people off to the point where they much rather keep their “work” work separate from the impactful work they do, inspiring as it is.

Perhaps applicable only in my present context: What I’ve been learning from these conversations, particularly in the last couple of weeks, is that the people who are able to recognise and acknowledge the environment in which they find themselves in, seem more able to continue feeling excited and enthusiastic despite the challenges of their environment. Why might that be?