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?

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?

A simple mind hack that to help you start flowing with ideas is to switch things upside down (or inside out) and ask the question again with that new “negative” perspective.

Rather than asking yourself “How can I finish all what I need to do this week on time?”, simply say “How can I make sure that I get nothing done this week?”.

List all the ways that answers this flip question. From sleeping all night and taking multiple naps, to making sure you don’t delegate a single things to not prioritizing any task.

Then, one by one, convert those ideas into your current situation and see how you can figure things out with this new perspective in the background. How can you really finish everything on time? Do you have to finish them all?

we default to negative thinking by nature. We immediately find faults in others’ ideas and we can see why things will not work out, because, we tell ourselves, we are experts and we have tried something similar before, and it didn’t work out. So this is how we use this negative thinking to our advantage. You’ll see that your brain will have no problem whatsoever thinking of ways that things will not work. Let it do its magic.

Here’s another example with the new question in place:  

How can you make sure you offer the worst customer service ever possible? What are all the ways you need to do in order to drive customers away?

Go.

As a child, I was very distracted with my experiments.  

Me and my friends followed information like sniffing dogs. We had sponge-like brains that absorbed insight from all directions. What we lacked in knowledge we made up with imagination. 

A day in my life would start after school. When I’m out discovering how the world worked and what can we do to get what we want. Once, obsessed with healthy hair, we created a 6-hour hair mask that included raw eggs, olive oil, vinegar and crushed garlic mixed with medicine pills. Another time, when introduced to aerodynamics, we designed a flying mechanism that included pink balloons and plenty of plastic bags up our arms. We were ready to test it from the roof of a four-story building. And when it came to finding excuses not to go to school, we thought of heating our bodies in the oven, just two degrees extra, and pretend we had fever. Those are some examples of me making sense of knowledge I gained from sources around you. Thank God no internet was available then. I’ll give you the results of these experiments in a minute. Stay with me.

How we absorb experiences and think differently?

As a highly kinetic learner, I seek constant stimuli. Well beyond what my environment is able to provide. I try not to get too comfortable in one place as that may stop the flow of inspiration. On the other hand, as a divergent thinker, I consider providing as much stimuli in the ideas I share or the solutions I consider.

When thinking divergently, we generate ideas that go well beyond the scope at hand. We associate ideas with other topics. We create analogies. We power up our imagination. This mode typically occurs in a spontaneous “non-linear” manner that makes it possible to have many possible solutions in a short amount of time and draw unexpected connections.  

To stay the course of being truly divergent, we stay in this uncomfortable phase a little bit longer than the “regular” non-divergent people. We don’t stop on the first good-enough idea. We continue diverging until we get the best solution possible. Only when we demand to produce 10x more than what our brain expects, will it go out of its way to link unrelated concepts together, build on previous or others’ ideas, or see the unseen. We become the creative ideas we are producing. 

I knew early in my life that I am a problem solver and I think through ideas differently. It came easy for me and I learned how to feed my brain so that ideas come in high quantity, on demand. My early life experiments came in handy as I learned a lot on how things worked. Here is my report card for the three examples I shared:  

• After 3 to 4 experiments and finishing up all the eggs in the house, my best friend and I believe the hair mask worked. Our hair sample grew an inch after holding it hostage for 6 hours in that stinky aluminum foil. We measured the length of hair with a ruler. No need to repeat this experiment again. Take my word for it.
• My friends were not able to test the flying mechanism we invented. They were seen on the rooftop just before takeoff and one of their moms came at the last minute (during count down) pulling them both from the edge. I was waiting in my nearby home ready to put on my balloons and plastic bags before flying again from the backdoor so not to be noticed. After waiting for 30 minutes for a no-show, I knew something went wrong and thought they must have decided to jump in the pool instead.
• The original oven idea started with just heating our foreheads on the stove top so that we can show our parents we both had fever and cannot attend school that day. We then worried about burning our hair or that the rest of our bodies wouldn’t “heat up” properly and that our moms would touch our neck instead. My friend crawled inside the cold oven and I was supposed to turn it on. I couldn’t figure out how to start it. So I went to ask an adult. The adult was not thrilled by the idea at all. We stayed at 37 degree Celsius and couldn’t skip school that day. 

I know you have plenty of stories from your early experiment years that explains how your brain worked in different ways. What happened since then? Where are your experiments now?

Do you honestly think you now know better?

😉

Refreshingly yours,

Randah

Alone, together. When it comes to collaborative work, give facilitation a chance.