At around 5.30 am on Wednesday morning I woke up and prepared to head off to Stop Doing Dumb Things – the unconference. Today was to be a rare, and for many a first chance, for HR and customer service professionals to come together and help strengthen the links between the employee and customer experience.
In my sleepy state I burned the toast to a frazzle so with my first dumb thing out of the way I headed off into the dark on an empty stomach. Thankfully when I arrived in Vauxhall The Madeira Café was open and I had double egg on toast with bacon. It was delicious.
There’s already loads of content from the event online and I want to say a huge thank you to Martin Couzins for capturing so many pictures, words, interviews and songs and getting them online so quickly. Leonie, one of our guests, talked about different learning styles and how different people communicate in different ways. One size does not fit all. There will be more content and feedback to follow over the next days and weeks, for now I wanted to share with you one learning style, the artwork that Tim Casswell and his team created for us on the day. I’ve included the briefest of descriptions below each picture and you can listen to Tim’s interpretation of this here
This first picture is about setting the scene for the day, gathering people’s expectations.
We ran a World Café to help set the day up. Many ideas and thoughts and feelings were expressed. We’re here to try something different. Fear and trust and freedom to express and a whole bunch of other things caught our eyes, hearts and minds.
After the World Café people split up and talked about things in more detail. Communication, Value and measurement, Fear and trust, What and why of engagement, What can I do?
After lunch we spoke about, what works? We could and maybe should have teed this up in the run in to the event. By that I mean just asked guests to think about when and where they’ve seen good stuff going on. The importance of lunching together, to bond and share ideas came up and whenever possible, the importance of face to face dialogue. And when not possible, try skype, or video. And when not possible try the telephone. Use email as a last resort. We struggled to get lots of examples – I think we need to review and come back to this and gently develop it further.
This last picture was drawn rapidly at the end of the day. Subjects were suggested and Tim put them together in the moment. Some instant reflections on a challenging, useful, enjoyable and emotional day.
Huge thanks to everyone who encouraged, supported, attended, co-created and tweeted the day along. I feel so fortunate and sincerely humbled and motivated to know you.
There will be more to follow including feedback from guests, and more content summaries. For now – any observations and thoughts based on what you see here would as always be appreciated.
I was there! But I don’t remember the breakfast……did I miss something? Had great whitebait at the pub on the corner though at lunch.
On a serious note – for me the best thing about the day (apart from Doug’s singing) was the opportunity to meet some really great people. Maybe people at more traditional conferences are also just as great – but you wouldn’t get to know that in the more formal setting……
I breakfasted alone Julia, my heart was breaking for the loss of my burnt toast, and besides – no one else was daft enough to be in the area at around 7am!
Thanks for your feedback and thanks for coming. I really appreciate your involvement and your honesty, it was great to meet you, and we’ll do it again soon I hope. I’ll give you more notice re: the fry up next time eh
I have met great people at more traditional gatherings, maybe because a) people in general are great, and b) everyone is out of their “normal” routine, so generally are more relaxed and engaged?
Thanks David – of course there are great people everywhere. To your point about being out of the normal routine, one of our guests said they felt the informality we created together on the day in turn led to a ‘very relaxed, open and real feeling’.
I love this Doug – what fantastic pictures! Sounds like it went brilliantly and you should feel very proud of what you and everyone else achieved 🙂
Thanks Alison – we all pulled together and made a great team. I’m going to gather feedback and put together some of it next week so we can find out what folks really thought. It was a fun, useful and completely knackering day! Cheers for your support, I really appreciate it.