Week 30: Holidays, Documenta, slides and finding agreement
Week 30: Holidays, Documenta, slides and finding agreement
Summer in Berlin and reflecting on what I have been doing over the past weeks (and that is shareable)
Hey there! How was your week? I had excellent and intense weeks with lots of topics and meetings I cannot (yet) talk about.
We made progress with our new fund, and I took a few days off to reflect on all the changes around me. The twins finished school and went on a trip to Tel Aviv and are in Thailand now. One of them is finding a place to live in Zurich, where he will start studying in September, and Dina and I are getting used to a more normal life again.
I went to Documenta for two days and had a mixed experience there. In addition to all the controversy around this Documenta, I found many pieces reasonably “practical” or have a substantial degree of activism. I was a bit underwhelmed by most of the pieces, but I keep on thinking about a lot of them (which is one important dimension of art for me) I enjoyed the locations and the walks between them and took many photos. Until today I did not have the time to review and edit them because of all the other things going on.
Creating great slides
Creating slides is fun and total horror for me. I love turning thoughts into a stream of slides that I can use to bring my points across. I can do this super fast. My slides usually consist of a picture and one or a few words. These slides are easy for me, and preparing the deck for a 30-minute presentation usually takes less than 15 minutes. Right now, we are creating information-rich “reading” slides. There are a few challenges involved:
We have good ideas about the content. And we also have some ideas about how to visualize it.
As we know that designing a slide usually is >70% of the time spent on creating it, we are working with designers who turn our information, data, and scribbles into nice slides.
We are struggling with keeping the slides editable. We continuously have to balance where we use editable formats (for texts, tables, and autogenerated graphs) and where we use graphical elements that only someone capable of using design tools can change quickly.
We are slowing down our designers by asking them to work “outside” of their tool world, building the deck in our presentation platform of choice, which allows us to work with the deck, share it, convert it, and make it part of our daily life.
Do you have any best practices where to draw the line? In InDesign or pitch.com is the question here. ;-)
Negotiating and coming to agreements
Writing about this is tricky as I cannot share too many specifics. Within the past weeks, I participated in several meetings where we negotiated with multiple stakeholders. I had various roles: sometimes I was part of the negotiation as one of the parties, and sometimes I had meta roles like mediator or “interested party.” What made some of the negotiations work were a few patterns that I want to share:
Being well prepared and knowing your stuff on all sides
A genuine interest in the asks, wishes, desires, and needs around the table
An exact and mostly violence-free communication that allows one to understand
In situations where I was doing this with my teammates: excellent colleagues who know what they are doing well.
In some meetings having a neutral moderator/ facilitator helped a lot. Making sure parties are heard and understood helped everyone to find solutions.
Keeping a growth and ubiquity mindset helped to overcome obstacles that look big now but are small in the long run.
Allowing participants to make up their minds over several sessions and embracing new ideas makes coming up with new solutions and ideas possible.
Ensuring everyone understands what has been agreed by writing shared live notes/ minutes prevents misunderstandings in real-time.
Having clear mandates and timely communication and decisions.
This worked in multiple situations over the past weeks for me and us. And I think we got the best solutions for all stakeholders in different topics and setups. Sorry for being so blurry, but I cannot share our exact setups, environments, and issues.
What I watched, read, and want to share:
I learned about rubber kayaks and a custom bag maker from the Czech Republic
I tried to figure out space doodle NFTs
I enjoyed watching Christian Angermayer talking about psychedelics and therapy:
I played around with lateral.io
I had my espresso machine fixed and used my picopresso while it was in the workshop, and I was surprised by how good the espresso it produces tastes.
I read many paid newsletters which I cannot share.
I enjoyed watching some live music videos:
Thank you for reading so far, and I hope you found something meaningful.
Have a great week
Joerg