a Postcard from home in Paris
Hello friend,
I’m sitting quietly at home, just back from a 60km bike ride up to Chantilly. It has not been a good couple of days for Japan. I’ve been feeling unsettled, and needed to switch gears from thinking about social isolation, disconnectedness and violence.
Before all that, what had been on my mind was the undetermined period of time that I think of as “after the workshop”. I think I have enough capacity to write about that, now, before turning in for the night.
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Gatherings take energy to organize. It’s natural for event organizers and workshop facilitators to feel complete once the event is over, especially when it's not a given that it will go well. But there's often an invisible game of “after the workshop” that needs to be played well for the gathering to fulfil its potential.
Let me describe four recent experiences, so you can see the range of what I'm talking about, warts and all.
A one-off training session
My host had drafted a feedback survey and a follow-up email, so those were sent out the following day once I added the relevant links. We touched base a leisurely ten days after the session, to review the feedback and close our engagement. On-point pacing and a streamlined process for the host, the trainer (me) and the students.
Project team retreat
During the retreat, we’d scoped the high-priority workstreams, put in a few hours on all of them together and assigned leads for each. Not surprisingly, the pace and quality of work has really picked up since we’ve come home. An excellent example of leveraging “offline” time.
Community kickoff event
100% of our energy went to pulling off a successful event. In the week that followed, we made time to debrief and agree on the next event but following up with participants is still yet to be done. A classic case of peaking too early.
Community retreat
We didn't discuss what an ideal "after the workshop" might look like. Some of us took the initiative to produce an artefact, and I am now quite curious to see how far it'll fly.
Instead of trying to come up with good practices, I leave you with a provocation: what would be different if we organized 50% less events and workshops, and re-directed that energy to “after the workshop” instead?
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Celebrating cool projects by friends
J.D. and Ria were interviewed on the Leadermorphosis podcast about trauma informed collaboration.
Melinda is co-running an Art of Hosting training in Sweden, August 15-18th. Do take a look if you've been meaning to learn more about AoH.
Mona was creative director for “Batman x Skyscape”, a new immersive exhibition in New York. If that's close for you, please go visit and tell me about it! In the meantime, here's an interview on WWD.
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By the way, is it more likely that you'll open a Postcard if I send it on a weekday vs weekend? I don't have enough data to have a conclusive answer, so I thought it best to ask!
Thanks as always for reading, and wishing you a lovely start to the week ahead.
Tomomi
A church that caught my eye on the way to Chantilly. I was dehydrated and picked up a 1.5L bottle of water and orange juice at the boulangerie next door.