Series 3 - episode 2 - Mad props
I’m coming to the end of ten days in my home office, sleeping on the day bed in the corner, rolling over to finish Radical Help in the morning, sitting at my desk to hop onto Discord around lunchtime and check out what’s going on with work. That’s right, it’s covid isolation! The things we do for love.
The end-of-year wrap up emails have started coming in just as I’ve been thinking about this sentence on our website: “Our primary contribution to the future we want to live in is to work alongside organisations in the fields of design, technology and storytelling.”
We could probably write hundreds or thousands of words about ‘the future we want to live in’, maybe it’s enough to say for the moment that Simon Kuper writing about Paris feeling optimistic made me feel wildly jealous. I was 22 when the coalition government showed up and I’m sick of everything feeling like it.just.gets.worse. But I’ll save that for another day.
Instead the thing that has been on my mind in amongst my reading material and my general soppiness and these end-of-year reflections is relationships, how we show up in them and what that signifies for the future we’re pushing towards.
As an example. Eliot and I have a standing meeting in our calendars every fortnight. It’s called ‘Looking back, and looking forward (Retro)’. When we started doing retros, just the two of us, we had three columns - Start, Stop, Continue. And then one day we added ‘Feelings’, and now that’s the only column that gets used. As co-directors we look after each other, hold each other to account, deliver the compassion that perhaps we don’t give to ourselves. I have no norms for a co-founder relationship, so every day we are shaping it and how we want it to feel and be. And that gives me hope of all the other possible forms of relationship that could exist in the world if we prioritised compassion and honesty over… well, over a lot of other things.
A relationship full of abundance, generosity and a good dose of keeping ourselves honest.
Which we will keep on attempting to embody when we interact with our co-workers, colleagues, clients, suppliers, customers and everyone else showing up every day trying to do a decent job.
So to everyone that’s held us to account this year
Or reposted something
Or commented on LinkedIn
Or got one of these emails
Or taken us for coffee
Or made us lunch
Or bought us a pint
Or hung out in Discord
Or sent some work our way
Or done some work with us
Maybe next year we’ll get it together to have some nice studio Christmas cards done and be able to express our gratitude to friends and colleagues individually. For now, I reckon you know who you are. Thank you.
Finally, the work is not the only way to pay stuff forwards - the money helps, too. We’re making some charity donations to the tune of 1% of this year’s turnover. More on that next year. In the meantime: hope you get some time off in the next few weeks. Happy new year.
AG