Issue 002 - Being in Good Orbits
Hi,
I hope all of you are safe and healthy as this year comes to a close. If you, like me, have lost loved ones this year, you have my deepest condolences. So many things were harder than normal in the pandemic, but grieving was perhaps the one I felt the most challenged by. Many of us have family or cultural rituals around grief and death, and the inability to mourn losses or celebrate the people who have left us was an unwelcome challenge in an already challenging year. I hope that for all of us, 2021 may bring better things.
Being in Good Orbits
As I looked back on this year for the studio, it's impossible to overlook the role that good people (many of you!) have played in not only helping me get things started, but in having a rewarding first year.
I recently tweeted that many months of self-doubt preceded the studio's life, but what I didn't highlight was how full those months were with people in my community helping me think through what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. I don't think I have to wax poetically about why people matter, but in reading Tom Critchlow's latest piece on "Weak Ties and Strong Intros", I realized that I think of the people I'm connected to less in terms of the strength of our connections and more about the frequency in which we orbit each other. I attribute a lot of the opportunities in my life - and especially the opportunities that I've had with Yet Another Studio - to being in good orbits. (It may be unsurprising at this point to mention that my favorite subject in high school was physics.)
The idea of people orbiting each other appeals to me because it acknowledges that each of us have our own gravitational pulls - things that draw others into us - and that there's room for many people to exist within these orbits at different distances. It also acknowledges the creative collision or serendipity that exists when people's paths intersect.
As I look ahead to 2021, I'm making space to interrogate where I am being pulled into bad orbits and how I can spend more time in better ones.
Critical Business Salons
Speaking of good orbits, I'll give Tom another shoutout for creating the !& Discord server, which has been a truly wonderful thing to spend time in. Through it, I've been exposed to many thoughtful people, one of whom I've been orbiting more and more frequently - Nitzan Hermon.
The thing I appreciate most about Nitzan is the way that he can invite conversations and connections between people and ideas that would likely never be in orbit without his intervention. After being connected through !&, I participated in a few salons that Nitzan hosted, which were initially part of an experiment. They were some of the most enjoyable events I went to this year, and I'm excited that he has opened them up to the public for 2021 under the moniker "Critical Business Salons." Instead of a conversation with an ideal endpoint, these are gatherings with no agenda and no output - a loosely guided exploration between people with a creative and intellectual surplus.
Because Nitzan prohibits people from introducing themselves at the beginning of the salons, I've found the conversations to be much more engaging and less performative that similar kinds of gatherings. The salons will meet every Friday in 2021 and you'll see at least one familiar face if you join in January (mine), where we're exploring "What does studio culture mean without a studio?" Visit the site for more information and tickets or ping Nitzan on twitter.
Building an Organization that Learns
A thread that has come through a lot of my work, talks, and twitter conversations this year is helping organizations break down the silos that typically exist between "learning-oriented functions" like research or customer insights teams and the broader company. While I've talked about this at both UXRConfAnywhere and in my Democratizing Research workshops this year - I was able to push a lot of these ideas and start to put a bow on them earlier this month when I gave an invited talk for Asurion's Converge 2020 event.
I'm under no impression that I'm building out a unified theory of learning, but after spending so much time thinking about, writing about, and putting these ideas into practice with clients, I felt good enough about sharing something that was substantial enough for people to at least engage in and react to - at least for the audience in question.
I shared the following ingredients with Asurion, speaking to each of them in terms of the opportunities and obligations that come - either as a learning-oriented function who is opening up their practice or a different function who is being invited in. The talk started with a recognition that we have, in many ways, grown up in a culture (especially in the West) that reinforces knowing, not learning. Schools test our memories, not our curiosities, and getting into college, grad school, or finding a job are often evaluations of power, not strength (to give a nod to James Carse).
This is, in many ways, a stub of an idea, but one that I'm excited to push on more in 2021. If you have thoughts or reactions, I'm all ears.
Friends of the Studio - Podcast Edition
Daniel Zarick and his co-founder Benedict Fritz are building Arrows - a high-touch onboarding tool that helps SaaS customers reach success faster. In addition to doing this, they're recording a short podcast series called "Keep Going..." where they talk about the process, challenges, and joys of the work. I've found it enlightening and entertaining, and episodes are 15 minutes or less.
Eugene Kan and Charis Poon invited me to join them on "Making It Up" Episode 132 to talk about a piece I shared in Issue 001 - Courtney Martin’s “The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems. Making It Up is a weekly podcast exploring the latest news in the creative world and analyzing how and why it'll impact culture at large. It's one of my favorite podcasts and I respect both Eugene and Charis a ton, so doing this was quite a joy.
I recognize this has gone on quite a bit longer than I expected, but if any of this resonates or overlaps with things that are alive for you right now - let's tighten our orbits.
Stay safe and healthy, and have a very happy holiday.
-- Behzod