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Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

How amazing is your workplace?

November 5th, 2010 7 comments

Fun at work?

Fun at work?

I work for myself. And I have a great boss – most requests for training get approved, I work flexible hours, and if I really don’t want to take on a particular job, I don’t have to. I get pretty much anything I ask for from my boss.

However generous my boss is, I realised the other day that he may not be doing everything he can to help me do my Great Work. Because I am not asking for everything I need. In particular, I don’t (yet) have a workplace that really supports me in doing the best work I can. (I was inspired to think about this by hearing a reference to “the most fun workplace in human history”.*)

My best ever chance to have the most fun workplace in human history is right now – when I am my own boss, and I work mainly from home. Who else in my life is going to be so motivated to give me everything I need and want to get my work done?

So what would I ask for if I could have anything I want to support me in doing my Great Work? Here are some things I thought of:

  • an uncluttered, calm and tasteful work environment – nice pictures on the walls;
  • great coffee, available on demand;
  • someone to do all the Good Work for me that has to be done, but which is not my Great Work (including sales and marketing, bookkeeping and financial planning);
  • membership of a gym to help me keep in shape; and
  • an in-house café serving healthy, tasty food.

And then I asked myself how much of this can I have right away. So in the past few weeks I have:

  • de-cluttered my house and my home office, selling/donating/recycling/binning things I no longer need or want;
  • hung up the on my walls the pictures that were in my storage cupboard for so long that I had forgotten they were there;
  • bought, installed and filled the furniture and storage I need so that I now have a place for everything and everything in its place;
  • got back to inbox zero on a daily basis, and am working now on emptying my physical in-tray;
  • got back into exercising twice a day (at home rather than in a gym);
  • taken the time to cook a proper lunch a couple of times a week;
  • invested in a coffee maker that makes a thermos jug of coffee in one go – so I can take it up to my study when I start work in the morning, and avoid having to pop down to make a fresh cup every half-hour or so;
  • researched local book-keeping services;
  • started using an ironing service on an occasional basis to free up time for me when I am busy.

All of these are things I could have done at any time in the past 6 months, but because I stopped noticing the environment I was working in, they either never occurred to me, or didn’t seem to be priorities.

So I’ve also made a note in my ‘to do’ list to review my work environment again at the start of next year. I wonder what small things I’ll notice then that will improve my working environment straight away?

Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, what one thing could you do this week that would help you have the most amazing workplace possible? Leave me a comment below to let me know; I’d love to hear your thoughts.

* The phrase comes from Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job [Amazon associate link] by Dennis W Bakke. I heard the book’s publisher Mark Pearson use the phrase in a podcast interview with Michael Bungay Stanier.

** The photograph at the top is from Flickr.com, reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

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What can you learn from a glass of water?

December 6th, 2009 No comments

Glass of water

I attended a corporate awayday on Thursday, as a participant rather than a facilitator (for a change). It was a pretty good day, made better by the fact that the agenda was not too packed (only 4 main sessions), and time was allowed for networking and chatting. Not enough time for my taste, but then my preference now is for the Open Space model, which essentially turns an awayday into one long coffee break.

Guy Browning of Smokehouse led an entertaining session on creativity. He told some good stories, and encouraged us to try out some good techniques, one of which struck a particular chord with me.

What can you learn from a glass of water?

Standing at the front of the room in front of the 60 or so participants, Guy held up a clear glass of water. He asked us each to take the viewpoint of the glass of water, and write down what the glass of water was seeing, feeling and experiencing at that moment.

My thoughts were:

  • seeing: a room of people, a hand very close, windows and greyness outside
  • feeling: anticipation, fear, curiosity
  • experiencing: feeling new-born, just been taken to a new vantage point

Guy made the point that the exercise allowed us to project ourselves onto something as plain and unfeeling as a glass of water. And what we had each come up with told us something about ourselves – what we thought the glass of water was seeing, feeling and experiencing was connected with how we ourselves were at that moment. “You don’t see the world as it is, you see it as you are”. And I can see some links between my thoughts about the glass of water, and how I was feeling at that time.

This is interesting to me for two reasons. The first is because these kinds of projective techniques can be useful to facilitators, coaches or mediators. Rather than asking people directly to describe how they are feeling or what they are experiencing (when they may censor themselves, or say what they think you want to hear), you can use a technique like this to help people find other ways to reveal how they are – drawing, choosing a postcard from set of 50 postcards, taking an imaginary walk and describing what they can see, and so on.

The other reason this is of interest to me is that it is connected with bringing about change. We may be acutely aware of what we are unhappy with in the external world – what we would like to change. But we are often unaware of how our own actions are bringing about the outcomes we so dislike. For example, I blogged recently about how our desire for security and control may actually make us less secure.

If you’re not part of the problem…

Adam Kahane touches on this in his book on mediation Solving Tough Problems. He takes issue with the slogan “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem”. Kahane says that this slogan

actually misses the most important point about effecting change. The slogan should be…”If you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution”. If we cannot see how what we are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way that they are, then logically we have no basis at all, zero leverage, for changing the way things are – except from the oustside, by persuasion or force.

This is a really important point for anyone who wants to bring about change. It would be easy to see ‘being part of the problem’ as itself a problem for a change-maker, but Kahane encourages us to see it as an opportunity. Being inside a problem makes it easier, not harder, for us to have empathy with the other ‘problem people’ – they are more similar to us than we may care to admit. And it gives us an insight into how they (we) are creating the problem, how difficult it is to make personal change, and what we can do to make it easier for others to change – often by taking the first steps ourselves.

A cafe conversation

October 31st, 2009 No comments

CoffeeJohn Inman has run strategic planning processes for 15 years. This week he tried a new way of doing it, adding a World Cafe session early in the process.

World Cafe is a way of hosting small group discussions around cafe-style tables; the participants move from table to table, with hosts staying where they are, so that ideas spread around the room and grow and develop. The person running the World Cafe may try to recreate the look, feel (and smell!) of a real cafe, with tablecloths and flowers on the tables, freshly brewed coffee, and background music.

The end result? The strategic planning session achieved more, and in less time, than the process John has been using for fifteen years.

It was the most productive planning session I have ever had and I believe that is in no small part due to driving them into conversation early and the power of conversation transformed the session.

Hat tip to Chris Corrigan for spotting John’s post. Chris writes about his own similar experience with Open Space

These participatory processes are far more than “just talk” and with wise planning and focused harvests, they are a very fast way to make headway on what can otherwise be tedious planning processes.

* The photograph at the top is from Flickr.com, reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.