How We Jumped into the Unknown
It may sound like a cliché (or a pun), but Lab work is all about chemistry.. even when there are no real chemicals involved. We’re talking here about people. How they fuse, how they go head on in a healthy way and bounce ideas off each other, bringing forward the best in one another.
This here is a short story about (and written by) the amazing people at Glu Labs and their experience here.
Ioana:
When Tudor first came to us suggesting a lab where we are encouraged to create awesome things, i was a bit skeptic mostly because he was very vague about what we are going to do. But i thought why not give it a chance and join the lab.
But now, after a couple of months working with Tudor and my colleagues, I can say it was the best decision. Not only that i have learned better ways of organising and prioritising my work, but we actually manage to set up some interesting projects that we are going to focus on for the next couple of months.
Above all, the best thing i have learned so far is that “making things happen is fun, but making thing happen with a team as crazy as you are is the best fun of all.”
Daniela:
Honestly, I’m not the type of person that easily gets out of her comfort zone. When I first heard about Awesome Labs (Glu Labs came to us later on) and the idea behind it I thought to myself: “Oh, what a wonderful story!”. Yet, I will not going to lie, I was really skeptic about it. But then, I also considered the possibility that the story might come true and I felt the urge to make sure I will be there when that happens, be part of it.
So I plunged in, headfirst, in these uncharted waters. And the more we move forward with the project, the more I realise that it’s the best decision I could have made. We got to have our own safe lab, where our individual ideas and strengths fuse together into magic potions. And even when they don’t, and the experiment blows up in our faces, that is also fine, because we quickly learn from our failures.
Moreover, I believe that inside Glu Labs we all get to be individual experiments, because we have the opportunity to discover ourselves, work on our known strengths and find out new powers we might have. This is the place where we can learn that there are no limits that can’t be pushed.
Smaranda:
My work in the Lab, or how you can get high on relationships
I do not like to work! I hate doing things alone, after one hour of solitude, I get and itch and, like people addicted to a drug, I need to get out, meet someone, or at least call/exchange messages. This is why, when faced with the choice of a direction, fresh out of a mind numbing job, the only direction appealing was…being around people, connecting them, helping them help themselves.
A! Another thing that I needed to do, or feel, was stupid! I needed not to be the one with all the answers, I wanted to be able to say „I have no clue!”, with the solid belief that the world will not collapse on my head because of that.
The two things from above, the need for human connection and the one to feel stupid, can make it quite a challenge for someone to turn into a solid carrier, so I must be one of the luckiest people on Earth, since I did it.
I joined Tudor for the STORM project with Life is Hard, the project we call now Glu Labs, not because I had a clue about what was about to happened, but because I didn’t and I wanted to see how is it possible for a project to work, if you do not know from the start every little detail, direction and turn (you usually do not know, but that is a long story for another time). And from the gathering of minds that allowed themselves to not know and to be open to whatever experience lays ahead, came up something brilliant: practical things appeared, people started to pay attention, buzz was created.
It is magical (I will not look for a more down to Earth word because “magical” best describes it) to see how people can perform as an army of seasoned veterans, finely tuned to working together, with just a few hours of “lab time” per week, how much enthusiasm this challenge generated and how contagious this enthusiasm is, as much as I can read from the faces of everybody interfering with Glu Lab.
I can only end by saying that what you don’t know is more important than what you know and I have never been so happy that there are so many things I do not know.
Rox:
So this guy is brought in and he starts talking about.. well, nothing much, really. Something about, a safe environment for us to try new things. All very vague and our faces were a mix of confusion and boredom, but with a tint of curiosity. Much to our surprise (and his), half of us raise our hands when, at the end of the presentation, a final question is asked: “Who wants to join me?”.
The guy was Tudor and the safe environment later became known as Glu Labs.
This was happening a couple of months ago, in Nov 2015. I still couldn’t tell exactly why I got involved. To be honest, I’m not one to get off my chair and break out of my daily routine to jump into unknown territory and I’m not a “roll up your sleeves and get to it” kind of person. But in that moment, my brain went “why the hell not?” and my hand responded accordingly. It may have been the unknown. It may have been the possibility of doing something else besides the usual tasks or the chance to learn something new. I’m guessing it was all that.
But brain and hand made a better split decision than I would have. It’s now February, less than 3 months since we said yes to this confusing lab and our 2h/week meetings turned into us choosing to spend our free time together doing stuff, we slowly but surely got involved and started taking ownership over OKRs and helping each other. And the rush from it all and hunger to get to work is just amazing!
As for me, the programmer who sat on her chair and did her job? Well, in December i got my my hands on one of my wishlist books, Laszlo Bock’s “Work Rules!”, with the promise that after I’m done with it I would be telling the rest of the team what it’s about. I’m also a very proud owner of an ongoing OKR and working on validating an idea and gid. Who would have thought, huh?
Honestly, it’s just best decision I could’ve made, getting involved in this project. The things I’m learning, the confidence boost and courage to just do, to pitch my own ideas, the team! It’s more than I could’ve imagined. Working in such an environment where it really is safe to crash and burn as long as you learn something from it, were you get high on people is simply a great experience. And it’s just the beginning! Who knows what will come next?
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