Life taught me that we are messengers. That is in sharing that we grow. It was during one of these exchanges that something came up and changed our team’s routine ever since.
The messenger this time was our friend Ângela Cardoso. The word that describes her profession is consultant, however for me, the word consultant doesn’t do justice to her magic. Technically, she helps organizations and teams to materialize their vision of the future and bring it into their daily lives, as well as to collaborate in the way they work to deliver that vision to society.
The definition of a strategy, a customer and user experience, is the tangible part of Ângela’s work. The intangible part involves the relationships between people, with the aim of helping them achieve their purpose.
For Ângela, that’s her favorite part of work, which she refers to as “untying knots”. Through specific methodologies and practices – future foresight, design thinking, business agility, facilitation techniques – her interventions help to improve collaboration and communication within the organization and optimize productivity and the delivery of value. Each of her projects is adapted to the specific context of each organization and team, so interventions vary greatly.
In Projeto 84’s case, upon listening to us, Ângela felt that our team was lacking a bit of glue and proposed a simple ritual: get the team together once a week and have each person share an image, an idea that had caught their attention. In this way, we would create an environment of sharing, where each person’s creativity inspires the entire team.
It was interesting to observe how each person’s resistance emerged. “But show what?”, “show how?”, “But is it a specific theme?”. One day I heard, “The human being doesn’t know what to do when you give them freedom”. We’re so used to being told what to do that when we’re told we can do whatever we want, we become uncomfortable. When confronted with something new, we have two options: reject it and stay in the same place or embrace the uncomfortable and evolve with it. A journey began that allowed us to get out of automatic mode and make ourselves known to the rest of the team as human beings.
During this journey, the shares have been many. From a brunch in the atelier, a yoga class at sunset, learning how to take pictures underwater, and even various dialogues through art.
In these shares, we have access to the other’s world, something that in work environments with vertical thinking, there is hardly any space to make ourselves known and be seen. These shares have brought us closer as a team, but they have also brought a lot of discomfort. And it is in these fluctuations that we reveal many of our facets to each other.
As creatives, we need something new to cultivate creativity. Through these shares, our perspective changes. “And it is through change that we allow ourselves to grow. The only way to change is to learn. The only way to learn is by exposing ourselves to new things. And the only way we can expose ourselves is if we throw ourselves into new experiences.”
And you, if you had the opportunity to sit with us at the table, what would be your image of the week?
Fátima Gonçalves
