Second bootcamp completed. We were joined by Marie Haller from the Hub. She and I worked together for a few months before I switched to a new job. I was excited to get to interact and engage with her.
Yesterday we had a new exercise—take 5 minutes to talk about project, 5 minutes to write down question presented during and new questions raised afterwards. Then choose one of the questions as a leading question to begin a deeper exploration of the project.
I’m noticing themes and patterns to the Bootcamp exercises. Active listening, asking the right questions, orienting yourself to the right context, adjusting based upon who is in the room, rinse, lather, repeat.
This week’s exercise felt less well designed than week one’s. To continue the bootcamp and exercise analogy, strength training or conditioning is often about isolating one set of muscles or fitness goal so that you get better and better at just that. My main critique of this exercise was that the specific emphasis wasn’t clear.
The exercises and interactions are good fodder for thought and, admittedly, there is part of my brain that is stepped outside of the actual interaction.
It has been a great process so far. It is a deep privilege to be in this class with Jess and Marie–I knew that EEK would attract stellar people (his tribe) to the bootcamp and this has been proven to be very true!
Eugene is discussing.
Eugene 2:45 pm on October 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks for posting your reflections so quickly, Eugene, both good and bad! I definitely try to layer my workouts — I do the same thing when I’m designing. It’s great when it works, but it can also cause problems. (This is what happened in my one disastrous workout from previous bootcamps.)
The muscles I wanted to exercise this past week were:
Asking generative questions. In this particular case, I wanted you all to practice listening for questions.
Synthesizing in real-time. Again, thinking in questions was part of this, but also thinking spatially.
Facilitation.
My followup thought experiment is: What if I had chosen two muscles, instead of three? What would this workout have looked like? Thoughts welcome!