a Postcard from the Hungarian-Croatian border
Hello friend,
I’m on a highway bus from Budapest to Zagreb, crammed with sweaty passengers. Croatia is slated to become part of the Schengen Area but for now, a stern-faced immigration officer has come onboard and taken all our passports. The air in the bus shifts between tension and boredom. I'm not sure what happens if someone is turned away. An expensive taxi ride or hitchhike back to Budapest, most likely...
In the meantime, I wanted to tell you about a/sync.
I've been working remotely with international clients since joining AQ in 2009, and part of a distributed team since moving to Paris in 2014. I think a lot's been figured out as to how to thrive as a remote/distributed/hybrid team, and the tools keep getting better and better. But this expertise is not evenly distributed — or even well-known.
I want to change that, in partnership with my friends and collaborators Andrea Darabos and Stefan Morales. A/sync offers experiential learning programs, to help distributed teams achieve focus and flow. Here are our six principles:
Take the time to design our time - Design for variation in whether, when, and how we meet.
Document and collaborate async - Make work more visible and collaborate without meeting.
Choose when and how to be productive - Work with the energy and attention of each individual.
Make commitments and decisions together - Build shared trust and transparency.
Reflect, learn, play - Invite serendipity and creativity into our work.
Prioritise our wellbeing and belonging - Don’t forget: we’re human.
If this is an area of interest, please get in touch or give our LinkedIn page a follow. Each Tuesday we'll be sharing helpful practices for sync and asynchronous collaboration.
Celebrating cool projects by friends
My good friend Sam in London is writing their MA dissertation on social power, and looking for stories about what public toilets represent to different people beyond a biological need. If you have an emotional memory or experience to share, please help them out!
Alex has launched Designers in Space Community to advocate for the strategic use of design in the space industry. There's an intake form for new members if you want to get involved.
Over in Europe, we've been going through a heat wave. Tell me, what's going on in your part of the world?
Tomomi
Co-working with Andrea and Stefan in Budapest, finally meeting in-person after many months of collaborating online.