Hi, my name is Tomomi.

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

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.

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.

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!

Week 16! Since my last entry 12 weeks ago, I had a string of travel and then COVID-19 and confinement hit and now, here we are, painfully transitioning into another kind of era.

Of those twelve weeks, four have been in “confinement” at home in Paris. I’m one of those fortunate to be able to stay at home, where we swing between fighting against anxiety and fighting against inertia. Time feels like it’s stretching and contracting at once.

It seems as good as time as any to dig myself out of this surreal limbo state. I won’t backfill the weeknotes, but simply re-start.

I spent a few days in Ningbo and then Shanghai for a small family reunion. Wow, it’s been more than a decade since I’ve had a chance to visit mainland China and I was super curious to experience first-hand their mobile technology.

I found it’s the type of convenience that comes with a feeling of brittleness. What happens when the tech fails? Getting locked out of a WeChat account, losing access to an Alipay account etc. would grind your daily life to a halt. The un-traceability of cash and paper tickets is a nice option that I’d not really thought about before. Overall, the taste I got for centralized transactions was fascinating and disconcerting in equal measures. It’s a parallel universe to the Western-centric digital world that I reside in, and the majority of the population from either side don’t particularly seem to be concerned about that.

Sadly, it wasn’t the best timing to be exploring China. We made the decision to cut the trip short amidst mounting uncertainty about the new corona virus.

Reading:

• 直観の経営 「共感の哲学」で読み解く動態経営論 by 野中 郁次郎, 山口 一郎 (link) - I hadn’t realized that Ikujiro Nonaka of SECI model of knowledge dimensions fame was still a prolific author! This book is about the philosophy of empathy, written with a phenomenologist.
• 引き抜き屋 1 鹿子小穂の冒険 and 引き抜き屋(2) 鹿子小穂の帰還 by 雫井 脩介 (link) - Skimmed through this novel about executive head hunters, to try something different. Shallow and unrelateable characters but interesting tidbits about this industry.

This was the second half of my time in Tokyo, which I typically start by longing to go home. Health deteriorates, sleep quality is in the pits and energy is low. But activities are full-on, interesting opportunities continue to present themselves and I somehow find pockets of time to connect yet a few more dots. It’ll pay off in the following months.

Ended the week by going to the neighborhood library to pick up a few books for next week. They’ve rebuilt it from the ground up and it’s an amazing community space with everyone from babies to grandpas.

Client work

I took part in a user research project and spent a few afternoons designing a dashboard for another, so I feel grounded in practice. Too many workshop-only projects and short consulting gigs will dull the sword. Gotta keep doing the doing.

[Projects] Design Research Tokyo

Ran a ResearchOps 101 event, building on activities by the ResearchOps community. The prep was more stressful than I’d anticipated and so I was especially heartened to get positive feedback from an audience that I’ve come to know fairly well. To be continued when I’m back home in Paris, so that other communities can organize introductory events about operationalizing research. It was a blast to go out with the DRT organizer team two weeks in a row :)

[Projects] Secret upcoming project

Got together with Sachiko to feel out the edges of what we want to do and how we might go about doing so.

Reading:

コミュニケーション力を引き出す 演劇ワークショップのすすめ by 平田オリザ (link) - I was keen to learn more about how workshops are utilized in stage theater, especially by Hirata Oriza who uses them extensively to work out his scripts. This book offered a fresh perspective on tackling typical org culture topics like encouraging communication and creativity by using theater activities as a tool. Unsure how much I’ll be able to apply it myself but it was interesting how sensitive he is to how participants react to certain situations. Negativity, shyness, being boisterous or rebellious - these are all human reactions that need to be incorporated into the dynamics of the room. I’ve long stopped using the lens of “difficult participants” as I find it self-centered but Hirata takes it to another level with the normality in which he anticipates and rolls with these reactions.

I had a strong first week at work, with lots of hearty discussions and a string of lunches and dinners with friends and peers. I was introduced to about a dozen people whom I’m sure I’ll meet again sometime. On Saturday I attended a talk event about the popularization of philosophy as a current business trend, which added a few books to my wish list. Afterward, I visited a colleague’s home to see the kids, had dinner with another, and ran into two people I knew on the street. Feeling right at home in Tokyo!

[Projects] Design Research Tokyo:

• I had the chance to participate in a DRT book club event for once, instead of just helping to plan it from afar! Having the space to geek out about stuff is such an adrenaline boost.
• Worked out rough plans for February and March events.

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.

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.