My First Working Lunch

Yesterday, I attended a iZone working lunch with eight iZoners. The working lunch was structured around the theme of reigniting the iCamp fire in 2014. Working lunches provide a structure for exchanging ideas, collaborating with iZone colleagues, and building shared knowledge.

For most of the session yesterday, we engaged in a forced association activity to spur ideas and associations between the iZone camp and more abstract concepts such as a sports team, a potluck and a neighborhood. My first experience with forced association was during the iZone360 team retreat in December. Participating in the activity during the working lunch reinforced the value-add of the force association technique to encourage atypical or non-traditional connections between two concepts.

I believe that this was the first time the working lunch had been used for ideation purposes. While I enjoyed the opportunity to engage with other staff in-person, I wonder if ideation or brainstorming activities could be facilitated virtually via Google Hangouts or another platform. Although there are limitations to the number of users, it may encourage people to participate knowing that they can engage remotely and will not have to travel. Having said that, I think the working lunch structure and setting enables a comfortable environment for sharing knowledge and ideas. I look forward to hearing about upcoming working lunch topics.

Immersion

One of the items on our Week 1 onboarding checklist is “Being immersed in timely work -- Essential Allies Challenge.” It’s there to remind us to be deliberate about the immersion experiences Angelina has, since being immersed in current work gives a kind of inside-out view of a project (different from reading a one-pager or browsing a web site). Coming to the Ideation eXchange for the Essential Allies Challenge this Saturday is certainly a way to have that kind of immersion. But what struck me today is that, in a new job, almost anything has the opportunity to become an “immersion” -- you’re constantly immersed in a new language, new culture, and new content. In fact, NOT being immersed may be the rarer experience. (And wondering right now what’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from immersion -- would that be “surfacing”??)