Hello friends!
Apologies for the delay. The last few weeks in Bangkok were exciting and hectic, so much has happened that I still need to process properly. I hope this newsletter gives you a glimpse into how everything might evolve in the future.
Colin and I spoke longer today, but I decided to share only the first half of the conversation to protect personal details.
Enjoy the read/listen and have a nice day!
Recent internal updates
Bence, Anya, and I finished the first version of the new website and launched it. It’s currently hosted under deepwork.network and deepwork.studio.
I’m working on two organizational design projects for IntermediaLab and BioDAO. Both lay the foundations for their projects and I am planning to suggest more long-term collaborations to guarantee long-term survival. Thanks to Sascha for the support on the workshops and Lucia for translating the workshops into Spanish.
Justina, Laura, Ira, and I hosted the eighth Deep Experiences Salon. We had a lot of amazing activities/experiences and it felt like a new milestone. You can find some photos here and more details below.
I facilitated a series of IRL workshops on collaboration, problem-solving, and more. Details below.
We received a 10% referral fee from InfluenceMedia for connecting them with our friends from AgentCoin.
The KAON project is completed but they have not paid the final invoice yet.
How was Devcon?
Apparently, around 12.000 visitors came to the massive venue and mingled around community hubs, talks, booths, and semi-private workshop spaces.
Adoption Hub
Our hub, co-organized with some of the most experienced designers, researchers, marketers, and product people, was really well attended. I was impressed by the density of knowledge and learned a lot even in the brief moments of stopping by. I cannot express my gratitude for being friends with this lovely group of experts.
The hub had a big picture of a chart illustrating the lifecycle of projects and its hurdles along the way. Many visitors commented on it and liked it, which is a good sign since we decided to put a similar diagram on our new website.
BD, sales & emerging collaborations
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, a small group of us started working on a more streamlined and scalable BD & Sales process, I sketched the process before Devcon started.
However, I will need to revisit it because I found myself mostly reconnecting with friends, which was a much nicer way of using my time there. Some of the conversations were driven by the intention to collaborate on the incubator concept, writing about the “peer-to-peer skill protocol”, or discussions on org design. I will share more details in the coming weeks.
New IRL workshop format
After EthKL I completely restructured how I approach public workshops and the last few I facilitated seemed like a big improvement. Instead of focusing solely on Deep Work’s practices, I discussed with the hosts what they wanted to communicate to their audience and then designed an interactive session with them.
The main new element I played around with was a guided exercise to collectively create teams. Based on how I usually chose different experts to participate in projects, this process allowed a random group of individuals to find themselves among people with complementary skills with little discussion. You can find some of the slides and exercises on this Miro board.
Here are a few more notes from each session:
Design Jam
The design jam was a 48-hour open space for individuals with different backgrounds to coalesce around interesting real-world challenges, create solutions, and summarise them in a presentation. I facilitated a few sessions on the first day and followed the teams throughout the process. Many participants liked the concept for its inclusivity, non-technical challenges, and focus on real-world problems with the help of mentors.
DAO Summit
In a 30-minute intermission between talks, I facilitated a session (here are the slides) where teams split into sub-groups around a hypothetical crisis scenario and we asked to coordinate to mitigate the crisis.
Parallel Societies Congress
I was honored to host a session among some of the smartest people I know and deeply respect. The goal of this session was to demonstrate the purpose of buildcities.network and explore ideas to resolve local challenges in cities based on the network-state concept. Four groups participated in parallel and one interesting piece of feedback was the suggestion to introduce a facilitator to each group in the future.
Adoption Hub
At the adoption hub, I decided to experiment with the importance of facilitation to minimize coordination problems. In hindsight, it’s worth bringing up in the session but not something to delegate directly to a team member.
Deep Experiences 8 - Bangkok Salon
Thank you to everyone who came to join us in a spacious villa in Bangkok. When we started working on a third-space concept for deep human connection and experiencing each other’s interests, it was only Justina and me, or Colin, Savannah, and me.
Justina counted the events we hosted in the past and this was the eighth time we intentionally met. This time over 40 people came, enjoyed each others’ company, and stayed for a whole evening. It was almost unbelievable to hear from many guests that the experience of the salon matched its intended purpose.
If you read this and you were there, thank you so much for coming! It would not be possible without you. If you’d like to participate in a review session to plan how to make it even better next time and record our contributions, feel free to join it this Thursday.
Deep Work Community Telegram group
We created a Telegram group for everyone interested in a more interactive channel to stay in touch with us: t.me/deepworkfriends
We will post some shorter updates to the group and are always happy to hear about your projects and goals.
I feel like there is much more for me to discuss, and I am incredibly grateful to be connected to you all. Have a wonderful start to the week and I’ll see you in two weeks!
Andrej
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