Being #remotelyhuman: Signals, Serendipity And Safety

Being #remotelyhuman: signals, serendipity and safety

Thank you all for being interested in our work on reconfiguring the collaborative workspace. It was a highly compressed rendering of a deep exploration, so we thought we’d share not just the link to the Leading Edge Forum report, but also links to some short reflections from Victoria on: grounding meetings; silence, sound and soundscape in organisational settings; and, host leadership. Three themes we invite you to reflect on more, and with others, spring from the session:

1. Ceremony and inner signalling. What are the small daily rites and routines which will help us transition from our home self and fire up our work self as we walk up the stairs to our remote working station, wherever that is? And then back out again when we go back and join family life? (We are indebted to Roger James, writing after the webinar to draw attention to this, and to Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto as an elaboration of the importance of putting on and taking off our work ‘uniforms’.)
2. Configuring inner and interstitial spaces of collaboration . Pushing this further, we only mentioned in passing Nonaka’s notion of ‘ba’ as a “shared space for emerging relationships” . In the report we inviting people to approach this as an inner space to which we invite people as much as an external world in which we are visible and connected to others. Language and metaphor can play a role here in deepening both inner spaces and the space between people. How tuned in are you to the default languages in which you operate and what they do to create or clutter your inner spaces or the containers between you and others?
3. The alienation paradox of the new normal. A schoolchild, on returning to school, has found a world they don’t recognise: a hazard-taped playground, a bubble in there are none of their friends; a teacher they don’t know. This is perhaps our own new normal too. An awkwardly distanced office which puts us at dis-ease. What if the closest we get to each other is by staying #remotelyhuman rather than seeing each other IRL? Where are the easeful, friendly, cosy places of the new normal and how do we look after those? Where is home and belonging and how do we tend to it?

Where are we travelling next?

Caitlin is currently taking further the thinking on digital proxemics, and deepening her exploration of digital ethics.

Victoria is working in partnership with her and other LEF colleagues on three programmes around the theme of being #remotelyhuman: enhancing collaboration through technology; being a good 21st century knowledge worker; building resilience in the face of disruption by strengthening curiosity and horizon scanning capability.

Please do get in touch if you’d like to be fellow travellers in any of those conversations, or carry on this one. We are looking forward to reconnecting with you, at Z/Yen’s kind invitation, later in the year.

Further wandering & wondering