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📰 🍄🐚 Organizational Mycology – March 15, 2023

Next week we are running sessions at MozFest! See below, we’d love to see you there. Also make sure to check the entire MozFest programme. Some friends of Org Mycology running other sessions, including Borhane Blili-Hamelin discussing AVID.

Our Oblique Thinking Hours are back! We had over 20 participants from all corners of the world coming along to work with us to explore building empathy with visual intelligence. We had some amazing conversations about how we see the world differently and similarly to others.

Next week is MozFest

We’re doing a session on Biomimetic Problem Solving March 21 at 12pm Pacific and we’d love for you to participate. This is a chance to work with the virtual biomimetic card deck that we built and to connect ideas from the natural world to problems we’re facing as a society. We’re excited to share this with folks from around the world.

Beth is also doing a workshop on Boundary Spanning Work based on her research on folks whose work crosses between multiple industries, fields or organizations. This will be on March 20th at 1:30 Pacific Time.

To attend each workshop, you’ll need to sign up for Mozilla’s Festival (MozFest), and you’ll not only get access to these workshops but also a BUNCH more. Join in, we’d love to see you there.

Summary of the Oblique Thinking Hour

This week, a piece of feedback on our first Oblique Thinking Hour of the year caught our eye: “WEIRD AND WONDERFUL!”

That is what we aim for in running these experimental workshops! In this edition, we took our participants through a series of exercises exploring how we can build empathy through visual intelligence. Our “weird” activities asked breakout groups to look at and react to photographs and images of artwork. Individuals took 2 minutes to write their reactions before sharing them with other members of the group. The groups then discussed the similarities and differences in what they saw, highlighting how our backgrounds and expertise shape the way we interpret the world around us. In some cases, participants explained how their day-to-day job duties prompted them to look for particular patterns in what they see; others discussed how their lived experience with the topic of the image shaped what they saw. We then reconvened as a larger group to discuss themes

We believe activities like these can help us understand the people we work with and, as a result, facilitate more effective teamwork. What might my coworker see in this data that I am not seeing because I’m accustomed to looking for particular patterns, and vice versa? What experiences and expertise do my coworkers have that I might overlook in our routine work? These are some of the questions we hope participants will bring back to their organizations.

ICYMI, we plan to hold these OTH at two different times each month to give people from all time zones an opportunity to participate. They’re free, fun, and weird, so check out the next one!

What we’ve been up to

Jonah has been leading a project for our team where we’re conducting interviews across data science teams and companies to better understand the use-case for a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) tool built for the needs of certain data science teams. We’re having a great time connecting to a wide number of data science organizations to understand the ways they think about team data science inside of organizations. We’re exploring a bunch of topics: open science, reproducibility, team data science workflows, and how to involve more people in team data science activities. We hope to apply some of our insights and further inquiry in ways that we can share more openly as we build on this work. Do you need some qualitative inquiry work done to better understand your community or organization? Let us know-- hit reply (or email [email protected]) and we can give you a free consultation to see if our approach is a  good fit for your needs.

It is the end of summer here in New Zealand. I (Jonah) have spent a lot of this summer sailing at different weekend regattas in the Otago region of New Zealand with my 16yo son. Sailing is quite challenging, and I’ve only been sailing since 2020, but I’m getting around the course more reliably and able to survive in up to about 20 knots of wind now. I’m learning from an active fleet of ILCA sailors in Dunedin. It has been great to get out on the harbor and challenge myself with a new hobby every week, and it is a great way to spend time with the kiddo.

Jonah (202872) sailing with his son (173449) and other sailors in the Dunedin Harbour

Engage with us…

Plug for MozFest (see above)

April OTH

Collaborative Oblique Problem Solving – In this Oblique Thinking Hour, we will work together to identify areas of expertise and ways that we can respond to problems that challenge us to work more collaboratively on these problems. What can we do to support one another in finding solutions that allow us to think differently?

Contact us at [email protected]