Now-ish

Plage des Catalans; 6 February 2025

How is it March already?

In January, I was in Tunisia and Turkey to run a pair of tradeoffs workshops for UNDP. The workshops are designed to help well-intentioned, mission-driven teams break through to doing properly interdependent work in an increasingly uncertain global environment.

Tradeoffs are the desirable outcomes you’ve decided you’d be willing to sacrifice to achieve even more desirable outcomes. Counterintuitive, I know, but a structured process of talking about tradeoffs has transformational effects on interdependent work. As one of the team said at the debrief, “talking about tradeoffs shows [us] how to proceed where there didn’t seem to be any viable path forward previously.”

You can read about the workshop’s underlying logic here. Running the workshop back to back highlighted some unexpected areas for improvement — I’m working on it for the next run, which I hope will happen in a couple of weeks in Singapore.

Cooked and recooked beef, eggplant, and potatoes at NATO; 12 February 2025.

I spent the first half of February in Marseille (a short and inexpensive flight from Istanbul) continuing to clear up piles of boxes and going to the Plage des Catalans as often as I could. A municipal beach with clear waters swimmable year-round and schools of anchovies and sardines within a 10-minute cycle of home is an obvious luxury but how much of a luxury it is really is only becomes apparent when it is thousands of air miles away.

Now I’m back in Singapore for good. I’m still UCL-affiliated (I run their Southeast Asia executive education programs) but am now a free agent looking for interesting things to work on here and in the region. I help teams (especially senior teams) become more effective together, and am working on small-TAM software. And other things, of course.

If there’s something interesting you’d like to chat about IRL (or virtually), drop me a line:

Mangoes in the wild; 2 March 2025.