Hello, Gamestormers! How are you?
NYC is opening up rapidly. Indoor dining capacity is up to 35% ( plus 10% since the last newsletter), movie theaters are set to open Friday and large venues are open to 10% capacity. I have purchased tickets to the recently opened Barclays Center- home of the National Basketball
Association’s Brooklyn Nets. I’m excited to experience the "Reopen-NYC" experiment first hand next week.
We want to get out!
It’s been a year since we could do anything like it: all non-essential workers in New York were sent home on March 22, 2020. In the next few weeks we each will experience our one year anniversary of whatever we’re calling this.
As I write I can hear, through my slightly open window, voices from the pub across the street. Hat-and-scarf-clad patrons sitting outside in near-freezing temperatures, just for the opportunity to be social. To be out.
I think people are eager. Eager to get on a plane, to see a basketball game, to go to the pub and I suspect, at the rate we’re opening up, it won’t be long before we have the option to go back to an office. Soon enough, anyway.
To start thinking through the complexity, just this week we heard two distinct, prominent and opposing voices set
the spectrum for the multitude of options that await.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, at a virtual financial services forum on Wednesday, said working from home was an “aberration.” From Yahoo!:
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I do think for a business like ours, which is an innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture, this is not ideal for us...And it’s not a new normal. It’s an aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible.
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Salesforce Chief People Officer, Brent Hyder declared nearly the opposite. From the Salesforce blog:
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An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead.
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Or do we want to stay home?
Both Solomon and Hyder cited culture and increased innovation to support their approaches.
While abrupt, last year’s shift to home-bound work was uniform and absolute; it took time to set up the home office and learn to Zoom, but we were all in the same place (ha!).
In contrast, the emerging landscape will be more complex.
Two nights ago, I had dinner with a friend who works for a global creative agency, including offices in New York and Chicago. She, based in the New York office, told me the Chicago office just hired two remote employees. In New York. Hearing this scrambled my brain: the new employees' bosses, clients, culture would need to be based in the Midwest but they would office in New York; when they did go into the office
the leaders they heard from and the culture they experienced would be in New York, not Chicago; business happens very differently in these two places!
So, what will happen? I see the word ‘hybrid’ used frequently; it’s a start, but it’s only a start. The upcoming shift will impact more than meeting agendas and workshops: it’s all work. Decisions to work from home or the office are complicated by relationships with clients, colleagues, partners, satellite offices, suppliers, etc...
Have you started to think this through? Has your boss? What about your team?
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Draw it out
A year ago in the newsletter, we shared a visual framework to help make sense of our sudden work-from-home change. We used it again this week with our most recent Expedition, as a lens to look into the future. The assignment asked to compare the pre- and post- quarantine working world; we like the Directional Overlap framework more than the traditional Venn diagram because the arrows imply direction and movement, and that impacts the thinking.
I share with you as warning: the thinking varied
widely.
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| As important as the outcomes? The process.
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| Try
it for yourself, and with your team:
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Directional Overlap
Draw and diagram the framework, noticing the differences and similarities between your pre- and post- quarantine work landscape.
Some questions to get you started:
- How did you work in the past? What no longer makes sense in your new reality?
- How do you work now? Where are
you headed? What's possible?
- What constants exist between the past and present? What from the past is worth preserving in the future?
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Upcoming Expeditions
Our first industry specific Expedition begins June 14th. If you’re in the business of Education - a teacher, an administrator, a curriculum designer, involved with L&D - check it out. More info here.
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Since we launched Expeditions last October, we've been trying to get APAC timezones, specifically Australian ones, covered. We thought we solved it with our May offering, but we made the mistake of not calculating daylight savings.
We're thinking about making our upcoming, and yet unannounced, July Expedition at 8am Sydney time. Join the waitlist if you would like to be part of this group.
We have had a few night-owl Expeditioners from Melbourne, Seoul and Singapore join us as their night turned into day, but, of course, that's not suitable for many of you.
If you would like to know more about the Expeditions and our offerings in May, April & June, head over to our Expeditions page by clicking the button below.
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Podcast: Managing Remote Teams
Last summer, I Zoom’d with Luke Szyrmer to talk about how teams can get creative remotely. He was writing a book - and has since published it - on the topic of managing remote teams. We recorded the conversation which you can hear here.
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Maybe we want to do both
We've noticed a theme emerging in our Alumni Slack Channel. People want to integrate and become more fluid between work and private lives. In our book club, we have been reading "The Art of Gathering" by Priya Parker, sparking related conversations on boundaries where to place them when we facilitate.
When do we need to focus
on the participants as good hosts and, when do we need to focus on the content and the goals as stewards of the project or training? As lines have blurred, everything is part of everything else, including a desire to integrate our private life personality at work.
Where do you draw the line?
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