It’s impossible to learn something if you think you already know it.
If you find yourself responding to every question asked, commenting on all conversation topics, or talking about your experiences without a breathing moment, you’re manifesting ignorance more than anything else.

When we pretend to know what we think we know, we ignore anything that will contradict our beliefs. When we strive to give others the impression that we know-it-all, we portray the image of being better, more important and smarter. We also shut off incoming signals from outside sources that can greatly educate us, leaving us less smarter than what we thought we were.

There’s nothing more powerful than a leader who says eloquently “I don’t know.”
This is the ultimate wisdom from those who know.
It opens mind, ears and attention to what might be the answer. It grounds the person and connects with others who are eager to explore the question together.
Are you open for knowledge?

Organizations pay heavily for a big desk and a washed wall paint, yet little attention is paid for hallway interaction. How many ideas have sprung from the corner where the water cooler existed to host so many conversations with hidden opportunities of intra-departments idea collaboration? This is where creative ideas from different corners of the office floor emerge.

The situation of intra-disciplinary (or intra-departmentally) collaboration worsened is when we moved our work remotely and didn’t design for such interaction. Those non-essential conversations that don’t usually fall nicely into our over-crowded meeting schedules are the essence of creative ideas.

Some of us moved back into offices after long months of silo survival work. Others chose a hybrid situation, and some decided to move entirely online. Yet the question remains: How to design spaces that promote inter-department impromptu conversations? How to have more chance encounters and welcome serendipity into our manicured meeting schedules?

There are many ideas on this subject. Some with proven track record and others that don’t fit every situation. Back to you:

What have you done to design randomness into your daily work life?
How are you creating chance encounters with your team members?
What norms are you building to nurture a culture of innovation?
What have you done to create such spaces of loosely fit connections?

For some people, work is life.

For others, they work is in the way of living life.

And then there are all who fall in the spectrum between those two.

Regardless of where you are and how much you love your job, there’s great value in finding experiences that help you detach from work and become more involved and absorbed in your non-work life.

Typically these experiences involve learning new things (i.e.g a new language), seeking out intellectual challenges (e.g., playing chess), doing things to challenge ourselves (e.g., competing in triathlons), or simply doing things to broaden our horizons (e.g., taking a class in a field different from our job).

The more varied experiences you get involved in, the more you broaden your view and create the conditions to sharpen your systems thinking and analogy making skills. Not only that, but getting involved in outside experiences help us in two ways:

First, they force us to devote our mental and intellectual resources to something other than work. Doing so enables us to achieve some level of detachment from it.

Second, they can be highly reinforcing. They allow us to feel a sense of achievement and accomplishment. This can add to our satisfaction on the job or compensate for it should we find ourselves not in the ideal work environment.

How many outside experiences are you involved in that help you detach from work at a psychological level?

In Tony Robbins’ legendary in-person events, every ninety minutes the music cranks up and everyone gets on their feet to jump and dance. His assertion is that when you stay in your peak state, have a longer experience, and involve your full body, you can see new possibilities and perceive problems differently. This, in essence, levels you up to have a stronger will and have more faith in your exponential abilities. 

What if your body has different ideas than your head?

How would you allow it to communicate with you?

What do you think it will say?

In one of his blog posts, I read this note:

“Working with a ruler is pretty straightforward. Just about anyone can extend a line, or fix something straight if it breaks. It’s on the line or it’s not.

But curves? Curves are complex and hard to get right.

It turns out that humans bring curves with them, wherever we go.”

Seth Godin

Which triggered my research mode into what I instinctively knew about curves.

Most offices and schools have no traces of curves. Instead, they prefer the rulers. The straight lines. The cubes.
Ofcourse cost is one of the reasons. But what about perception? Could it be that we needed to stay in a straight line to be considered professional? Does it have something to do with the industrial economy and the factory production mentality? Do we crave structure because we’re afraid of being more imaginative? More creative? More curvy?

Research shows that curvilinear movements offer more flexible thoughts. (read: heightened creativity). What’s more, in her book “Joyful”, Ingrid Fetell Lee explains how curves made people more likely to believe that racial categories were socially constructed and elastic, rather than biological and fixed, and less likely to make discriminatory judgements about others based on stereotypes. (read: curves makes one less judgmental. Perhaps less racist)

Brining work and play together can start with incorporating playful curves into your workspace. Curvy room dividers, circular furnishing, round carpets or a flowing art design is a good start. It may be enough to be in a place where you can simply look at curves in order to think more flexibly.

Look around you, what curves do you see?

Though it was once believed that only mammals played, researchers have observed playful behavior in surprising corners of the animal kingdom:

octopuses playing with Legos,

turtles batting around balls, and

crocodiles giving each other piggyback rides.  

Think about it: Octopus playing with Lego! Are you playing with Lego?

(From “Joyful” by Ingrid Fetell Lee.)

We miss running into people in the hallway. We miss meeting friends of friends or as academics call them our ‘weak connections’. Those moments of serendipity sparked some amusing conversations and interesting people to meet. How can we replicate that feeling?

What if you planned virtual ‘watercooler’ moments to help energize a hybrid workforce?

Last year I ran a daily coffee break with one zoom room and an open invitation for anyone to pop in. I shared the link with my groups and contacts and those people shared it with theirs. During this 30-minutes meetup, we joined, met new people, had a quick coffee chat, got inspired and connected with old friends.

Some even scheduled their working hours and meetings around our coffee break! It was that important during time of no-socializing in 2020.

Find a time and place for chance meeting and side learning to happen. Create a remote coffee break room, invite colleagues to an online game before work, have a daily check-in routine with random employees just to say hi or run a simply storytelling session daily. Basic rules applies in any such interaction: No agenda, no job titles, welcome random conversations, and most importantly, listen. Perhaps this is the greatest gift of online communication, we are forced to listen to speakers one at a time.  

Consistently matters. This is the best connection you can create without much planning ahead or getting permission from anyone.

Stay playful,

Randah

When nurturing a culture of trust and collaboration at work, we often rely on a sense of camaraderie that is hard to replicate online. We cannot share our food on the same table, sit in a circle or read each other’s body language.

This takes our culture to a different digital mode. Not better. Not worse. Just different.

We now must go one level deeper and share our purpose, our values and the best way to heal each other’s wounds.

Here are some ways to help you connect with each other virtually and go beyond a little box on the screen.

1. Share small gifts and surprises, from handwritten cards to care packages to plants or desk toys.
2. Before a staff meeting, send the same food over to each person and invite them to eat during “lunch meeting”.
3. Build regular music playlists around specific theme and have people listen to it throughout the week. A unique conversation theme arises.
4. Ask each member to recommend a song to listen to. Rotate daily songs.   
5. Create an internal weekly group blog where each member is asked to write a short post on something funny / creative / strange/ foolish / bold. The trick is to keep it simple and easy, so it doesn’t feel like chore.
6. Set up regular shows for employees to share personal interests. Their passions, their causes, their struggles and how they overcome them.
7. Create fun contests or digital challenges to resemble friendly pranks that happen in the office (notice any surfacing bullies)
8. Host internal podcast and interview other employees. Focus on their families, hobbies, personalities, more than work. Let others get to know them personally.
9. Embrace anchors. Send a physical poster, a plant, or a desk item for your team with your name and number of it. Ask them to place it where they work daily. This anchor will remind them to call or connect with you whenever the need arises.
10. Send a “Good morning” message through IM or text. This morning connection helps plant a seed for people to remember you during the day or link you in a discussion they heard the previous day. Your network will grow and your culture of trust will prosper.  
11. The next time you feel the urge to write a long email about a subject at work, create a video instead. Your video will be more memorable and the message clearer. This can be as simple as using your phone to record a selfie or using an easy tool like “Loom” that allows you to share your screen and record yourself at the same time. 

What other ideas do you have to increase the connection between your remote-working team?