Time Zone Trouble
How to work as a team on three different time zones
One of the trickiest things we’ve come across since we started as Northern Quarter is just getting all of our four faces looking at each other. This initially doesn’t seem too difficult, but over the last ten months one or another of us has variously been located in Beijing, Manchester, London, New York and Singapore, usually with only one of us in a given city at a given time.
We’ve each somehow read over a thousand journal articles on culture, productivity and management, collectively written sixty-thousand words worth of MA thesis, and run workshops in Beijing, London and Manchester; but the biggest challenge we’ve faced has been seeing each others faces with regularity and purpose.
It’s really hard to be apart. Among the things we’ve learnt since finishing at Hyper Island has been the value of proximity — it’s just easier to see how people are feeling, what they’re struggling with, to make time for leisure and fun at the same time as productive work. Full credit to the remote teams out their who are working to their full capacity (head nod to Laïla & the team at Hanno, who seem to be doing it and teaching others how). Increasingly our weekly catchups were becoming a bit bleak — we wanted more structure, more connectedness, more motivation from one-another, not to get lost in the day-to-day and feel focused. Traction.
One of the ways we’re testing over the next few weeks is a massive “Yes, &” exercise.
Yes, &
This is one of the things we’ve taken from Hyper. It’s really basic — rather than ditching early ideas we should be continually adding things to them as a way of expanding our thoughts and getting beyond very early-stage thoughts on particular concepts, technologies, objects, etc. Instead of telling somebody their idea wouldn’t work because of X or Y, add something that builds round that problem, or that approaches it in another way.
So we’re doing that over the next few weeks.
How it Works:
Week 1:
• One of the team takes on the first week — thinking up some initial themes, ideas, concepts, platforms, whatever they want!
• We have a team-call after a week. We do ours on Sunday at 2pm.
• Everyone is given an opportunity during the call to ask questions, give feedback, and help shape the direction of the project.
• The docs and research are handed over to the next person.
Week 2:
• Someone new keeps up the good work, building onto the existing ideas and reshaping them, while paying attention to the feedback and questions from the previous call.
Weeks 3 & 4:
• Work the same way, with someone owning the idea for a week and then handing it over totally to the next person.
• On the final Sunday, we’ll choose which elements we really love and whether it’s worth continuing. The prototyping process follows the same path, getting user feedback and a high-fidelity prototype from each participant.
Hopefully at the end of our eight weeks we’ll have a really interesting proposal. We’ll keep you posted!
