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The Windy City

Perfect timing. I awoke at 6am Sunday morning, I’m wearing the super snuggliest dressing gown ever, and the coffee is on the go. Usually when I travel to the States my sleeping goes all out of whack, but last night I slept soundly, and woke in sync with my new timezone.

After a perfectly smooth flight and clearing border control in a new world record of 20 minutes (it subsequently took longer than that for my baggage to hit the carousel), I checked in to my fabulous room at the wonderfully named Millenium Knickerbocker hotel and took a late afternoon stroll around the windy city. I’m staying close to the John Hancock tower, all 94 floors of it. My friend Laurie recently ran up the tower so I decided to walk around the outside of it in her honour. Yesterday was cold and windy but even so I bet I went way quicker than her 😉

Neil Usher suggested I should check the local architecture, and he was right to do so, the mixture of the historic and the new seems to work really well here. I got hungry so I went to Giordano’s on Rush Street (well I couldn’t pass on an address like that now huh?) and after being told there was an hour and a half wait I took directions to another branch further South. I strode off purposefully down the Magnificent Mile (they’ve got the whole ‘name’ thing nailed in this city), and on arrival I discovered – yep, another hour plus wait. I settled in with a delicious local Green Light pale ale, and watched college basketball. Thankfully a guy named Chris spoke with me for a few minutes and helped me to understand how the game worked, cheers Chris.

Chicago style pizza is, well… different. It’s more like a bottomless pie than a pizza and even though I was Hank Marvin (hey I can do this name thing too right) when it arrived, I only managed to get through four and a half slices of my six slice small sized special, try saying that after a couple of Green Lights! My dining achievement elicited a frisson of excitement from my kind waitress which had the doubly beneficial effect of inflating my ego somewhat and her subsequent tip. We’re all winners eh? Then it was back to the hotel and I was all tucked up in bed by nine.

Today I’ll visit the Picasso exhibition before joining Susan Avello, Sabrina Baker and John Hudson for lunch in Millenium Park. I’m very excited about both of these things. Tomorrow will be another early start to catch my 9am flight to Minneapolis, and lunch with Tiffany Kuehl before meeting Diane and some of the Thomson Reuters crew in the evening to put the finishing touches on our big gig at Target Field, home of the Minnesota Twins. I will write more about this leg of my 2013 world tour soon, and the connections I’m making and reinforcing. For now though, this sure is my kinda town.

Happy Sunday, be wonderful to each other.

Time Travel – And Other Workplace Myths

Yesterday my friend Heather Bussing posted a link to a great little post by Scott Berkun titled ‘What Work Traditions Need To Go Away?‘ There’s loads of good stuff in the post, and in particular the challenge to ‘hour long meetings by default’, caught my eye. Last week I ran a workshop called ‘It’s Good to Talk – So Why Don’t We?’ for clients of the law firm Boyes Turner. The session was a mix of culture, behaviour and method around one of my favourite subjects, having more productive conversations at work.

During the workshop we observed that typically, people allow their diaries to be filled with back to back meetings, from 09:00 to 10:00, from 10:00 to 11:00 and so on, often running right through the day. I’m curious, how do you get from one meeting that finishes at 10:00 to another that starts at 10:00? Without the benefit of time travel, which I’m pretty sure is as yet not invented, you can’t. And at what point during your 09:00 meeting do you mentally disengage from what is going on around you in order to prepare for your 10:00? You can see where this is going, can’t you? Straight to some kind of Outlook Calendar invite infested, counter productive, unhealthy hell. And yet you persist with it. I persist with it. We all persist with it.

During the workshop, the short term fix we proposed was, if meetings are to start on the hour, then they need to finish by five to the next hour, at the absolute latest. Granted – this is a sticking plaster solution to a much deeper slavish cultural attitude, but at least this way, you get five minutes to walk from your 09:00 to your 10:00.

The Workplace Myth theme has also been on Neil Usher‘s mind too. Neil has co-created an wonderful Storify centred on #workplacemyths. It is recommended reading, festooned as it is with humour, agony, cartoons and a wonderfully sad video called Misery Bear Goes To Work.

I love how the separate togetherness of the Internet threads all this wonder together, and I encourage you to check out Scott’s post, and Neil’s emerging Storify. I’d love to hear from you too, if you have the time of course 😉

photo credit

Jamming Again

I’m going to help pull together another jam session soon. This time I think we’ll call it Development Jam, with the emphasis on ideas, propositions, that kind of thing. The format is simple. You rock up with your idea, agree a few ground rules for the day then share it, pitch it or maybe just develop it further with the help of your fellow jammers. I don’t know much more about Development Jam right now other than:

  • It’s likely to be on a Friday
  • It’s likely to be in London

These sessions are quite intimate gatherings. It’s a fine balance between having enough people to get a good mix of diversity, and not too many so that everyone gets their fair share of time. Your financial investment is limited to venue cost, a few basic materials and lunch. Budget for up to £150 and that should leave room for a beer afterwards. I have a few people interested already, a few more would be nice. 

Watch this space.