So, it's been a minute...
Yes, I'm still here -- thinking, writing, planning, wondering!
It’s truly been quite a while since I’ve last published here — but it’s not for a lack of interest, I can assure you! There’s been multiple threads of activity intersecting, colliding, and impacting over the last several weeks, of which I’ll share some perspectives soon. In the meantime here’s a quick rundown that I will try to discuss further in future posts:
⚒️ Planning & preparing for Designing with AI 2024 — This is a new event I am organizing with Lou Rosenfeld, since we officially retired the Enterprise UX annual event. Last year’s Enterprise UX conference happened to feature many intriguing talks involving AI. 🤖 So we realized, given current rapid developments, this topic warrants its own focused 2-day space for conversations grounded upon practical case studies, inspiring demos, and the advice of experts on the social, systemic, ethical dimensions.
🌟 Conducting performance reviews & navigating calibration discussions — This is frankly the “not so fun” part of management! 😅 Yet it is important and valuable as an exercise to ensure proper feedback is provided in a comprehensive and equitable manner, assessing the various levels, promotion criteria, and other aspects. I’ll confess that my own mental capacity was 💯 maxed out, with tons of reading, writing, synthesizing, grading/evaluating, and of course… building strong cases to defend choices with company leaders. Demanding, exhausting, emotionally taxing. Maybe AI could help? 🤔 😆 [joking, well maybe…]
⏰ Indulging in unstructured time as an antidote — I was fortunate to take a couple weeks off after completing the performance reviews! 🏝️ 🍹 And this time I took an unusual (for me) approach of not pre-booking tours, activities, etc. but instead allowing serendipity to work its magic, wandering around as the primary activity. Simply allow exploration and real “discovery” happen, at will. It’s a wonderful way to pushback on the day-to-day heavily structured life of work. As Ice Cube rhymed, “check yo’self, before you wreck yo’self” 😎 Indeed!
🙌🏽 Let’s workshop it out! — Returning from the refreshing recharge of vacation, I’ve found myself immersed in workshop-mania 😅 All for important, valuable purposes, to be sure! As you can infer from past writings, I truly enjoy planning & facilitating workshops. It’s not just some academic thing, either. I view them as crucial moments of “real talk”, even cathartic therapy, to suss out problems (or express grievances!) while building relational ties — especially across departments or silos. Customer requirements gathering, deep problem framing, defining our “MVP”, shaping marketing & pricing hypotheses, envisioning new interaction paradigms with rapidly hacked prototypes… each is a powerful workshop opportunity that, with the right structure and attitude of optimistic playfulness, can lead to long-standing value.