Mindful storytelling

weeknotes

Apr 6

Happy jam-packed April — my calendar is sweating with assignment deadlines, but I’m ready to start redeeming myself because March really spoiled me…

Snippets of the week

Gathered credentials for a new telecommunications opportunity
More service blueprint support
Planning for a Service Design 101 session
Design support for payment changes in our ongoing workstream, together with the solution architecture team
Reviewed my quarterly personal finances (throwing it back to my hard earned cashflow skills)
Prep for a podcast I’ve been invited to guest on, on being a change-maker!

On selling my story

This week, I spent a lot of time in existentialist limbo, thinking about who I want to be (in line with what I’m good at). Last year, I gave a talk on creative types and personalities and how spending a lot of my younger days procastinating on Buzzfeed quizzes helped me sell myself into a decent career.

I’m a huge believer in brutal honesty (especially in higher education) and I really wish someone told me how important it would be to know thyself, but better yet, sell thyself — aka tell a good story. Recently, I’ve been sifting through the past work our team has done and crafting them into shiny credentials (messy work disguised with attractive simplicity).

Storytelling has always been a cornerstone of the creative industry, because people only know your work as much as you allow them to. Sadly, stories also have the power to put filter to fact (I see this a lot), and this is when I argue that design can sometimes get a rep.

I used to think that design = strategy, because if not by nature, the alternative must be by design. This thinking pulled me to strategy in my first job, until I realised what I was doing was just telling a lot of stories (i.e. sugarcoating, white-lying, truth-omitting). Basically I became really good at saying stuff, even if this stuff wasn’t always backed by research or empathy. I saw this in the world of brand/marketing a lot, but I wanted to design-first, story-later.

I also spent Friday preparing a Service Design 101 session and thought a lot about who I was versus other consultants (who ostensibly, also did things like service blueprints and maps, much like a snippet of my own week).

A good analogy is comparing a designer of services and service designer. It’s different. We ask different questions, try out different things, and measure success dissimilarly. Everybody designs. If you do anything intentionally expecting an outcome, you are trying to do something by design. But not everybody is a designer. This meta-thinking was the first instance I saw cybernetics come to life, because there is a difference in the ‘doing’ and ‘intentionally doing the doing’ (aka being an observer of design). Much like re-prompting a LLM, different outcomes happen when you re-process something. ChatGPT is only as powerful as its abilities to take your input onboard every single time. It’s sorry when it doesn’t.

If we can all do design, let’s harness it properly (telling a good story doesn’t hurt either).

Run notes (Week 8/11)

Rolling 300s (14 x 300m at 5:45/6:09). This week I decided to eat the frog and do my least favourite run first. I was very bored on the treadmill, but doing these on a human hamster wheel keeps me on a strict pace.
7.5km easy. Pretty boring but ok.
11km long tomorrow. Wish me luck!