I'm a recovering academic who uses her insights from behavioural economics to develop methods that facilitate collaboration. In my weekly newsletter, I share the summary of my latest interview on the "workshops work" podcast along with an application of facilitation as a life and leadership skill.
Connections beyond LinkedIn || π€ Ep 8 on Creating a Return on Humanity with Philippa White
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Hi Reader, Last week, my partner and I met up with a couple (two facilitators) we only knew from LinkedIn. I didn't expect much when getting ready for what could have been the usual Saturday afternoon coffee. And in that spirit the conversation started: speaking about work, travel. The usual professional script. But then, our new friends put a set of Lego Serious Play and a deck of connection questions on the table and asked if we'd be up for something different. Of course! And within the hour we were talking about our childhoods, our fears, the versions of ourselves we're still growing into. We laughed hard. We went places you don't usually go with people you've just met. We even learned new things about our partners. Lego made the difference. And at the same time it wasn't just Lego. With food and drinks we get a container that lets us easily stay on the surface. But a game or a prompt makes depth inevitable. There's simply nowhere to hide. What makes me happy about this experience is that we met as LinkedIn contacts and the expected "professional" thing would have been to stay in that register all evening. Instead we played with toy bricks and told each other the truth. Isn't that beautifully 'unprofessional'?! π€ Waiting for you on the Unprofessionalism podcast:Philippa White sat in a business school lecture while her classmates chanted that the purpose of business is to make money. She already knew she was in the wrong room. She grew up watching her uncle move through apartheid South Africa with radical curiosity β bridging worlds that weren't supposed to touch. He also happened to be Nelson Mandela's doctor. What he showed her, no MBA curriculum ever could: that being more human is the highest-return investment you'll ever make. We talked about what it actually costs when people don't genuinely care about each other at work β and what becomes possible when they do. Connection and belonging, as Philippa will tell you, aren't the soft stuff. They're the whole game. π§ Click here to listen to the interviewπ₯ Download my 1-page summaryβUP_009_Summary.pdfβ π§ The workshops work Podcast ClubThe workshops work Podcast Club is gathering again in March on the topic of "Learning from Game Design" You can join us for freeβ. βClick here for more information and to sign up. That's it from my side. I hope to see you next week! Myriam
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How can we facilitate collaboration?
I'm a recovering academic who uses her insights from behavioural economics to develop methods that facilitate collaboration. In my weekly newsletter, I share the summary of my latest interview on the "workshops work" podcast along with an application of facilitation as a life and leadership skill.
Hi Reader, Last week I missed my own event by two hours. I wish I could blame the traffic or another force majeure. I cannot. I was sitting at home, finishing my meditation, about to journal when I saw an email from one of the 20 people who signed up for the event. They were waiting for the podcast club gathering I had organised, were excited about, and then... did't show up. Timezone confusion. A calendar entry set to the wrong city. A human, irreversible, very embarrassing mistake. I still...
Hi Reader, I'm still hiding behind an old version of myself. Today, I interviewed someone I highly admire, we got deep very quickly, he shared personal stories that are deeply relevant to the podcast and the theme of Unprofessionalism that I am exploring. Each time I wanted to extrapolate to the higher picture, the meta-level, the analytics, I realised that I lost him. The sparkle disappeared from his eyes. The recording ended up being the shortest I've ever made and instead of being happy...
Hi Reader, Most people use AI to write faster, I ended up using it to slow down π Recently, many emails sound similar β same structure, same words. I find myself skimming through sentences, filling in the gaps. Basically not reading properly. Luckily, for my book-writing process, I had started to work with AI in a peculiar way: asking it for its tough love when reviewing my content β instead of writing it for me. Applying this collaboration to emails, I learned that I was misreading them,...