Letter to Marlis Feb-Mar 2018

Hi Marlis,

Another 2 months gone by and that makes it almost exactly 2 years since we said our goodbyes. Facebook told me yesterday, so it must be true 😊! Just a few more weeks for the Anzac cold snap to settle over the ACT, so I hope you’re ready and warm for winter. Like almost every time I write, lots have happened, so I’ll dive straight into it.

Perth

Late February I travelled with Yumi to Perth, so we finally got to see the first part of beautiful Western Australia. And beautiful it was! We arrived early on Saturday and travelled to Margaret River in the southern part of the state and enjoyed the coastline, a really, really long pier and beautiful weather. Then on Sunday we drove back another way to Perth and just enjoyed the scenery. Yumi had to work and I did not, but as it happens I know a few people around town and they were very gracious hosts, inviting me to coffee and lunches so I ended up entertaining myself as much or even more than Yumi, who had to sit in meeting rooms and talk to people while I was out exploring the city in beautiful weather. I think I walked about 30 kilometres in 2 days, but it gave me a real feel for the city.

The weird thing was that the people I spoke to consider Perth small, almost like Canberra and not very attractive. Well, I can’t say I agree. There’s heaps happening, lots of  things being built and I would not consider a 2 million people city to resemble Canberra in any way. It actually feels like Adelaide, navigates like Brisbane, has Melbournian appeal and the proximity of the ACT. It’s a city of cities. Sydney does not come into it though, although the waterfront has some very nice architecture. I wouldn’t mind ending up there at some point, seeing the sun set in the ocean again. It was only when Yumi’s colleagues took us to diner to see a sunset that we realised that we actually never see it set in the sea. Apparently, we were not missing it too much. 😊 On the Wednesday I travelled solo up to the Pinnacle desert 200km north of Perth and I am not sure what caused it but it was a very emotional trip somehow. This is the Australia I wanted to see, that I had been looking for, finally found it after 4 years! The sky was so big, so wide and so blue, I could have driven on forever! The Pinnacle Desert was very much worth it, a very strange landscape of sand an 1-2 meter high pillars made of dead sea creature shells. Adding to the fun were the oblivious tourists just looking around at all that weirdness. The drive back and forth is not even that spectacular according to people who live there but it was to me. I just made it in time to pick up Yumi from her last meeting, kept stopping to take in more of the sights 😊.

After Yumi was done working we spent a day travelling to Rothnest Island which was very nice. We rented bikes and managed to get around the whole island in a few hours with some very steep hills, but our Dutch years of training kicked in and we zoomed up and down like nothing else. There’s so many beautiful bays that I stopped taking pictures at some point and just enjoyed the waves crashing and the blueness of the water in other places. We saw a few quokkas traipsing around and took selfies with them (it’s a thing on social media, never mind) and we even went snorkelling! The water was a bit chilly but still okay on the surface. On my very first exploratory swim I encountered a massive bull ray just cruising right underneath me, so very cool! That was the most exciting wild life in the water all day, but such good luck. Yumi missed it, waiting on shore to see if there were sharks trying to eat me 😊. Our last day was spent in Fremantle, just walking around a bit, finding a lot of Dutch heritage and some shipwrecks in a museum. I made the unfortunate decision to have a chat with one of the volunteers and he enjoyed his job so much that we stood there for 45 minutes (could have been 50) listening. Wow, that guy had some stories and more, and more, and more…At some point we managed to escape both him and the museum, both very lovely but there’s only so much you can know about ship wrecks!

Drawing

Since a few months I’ve been practicing my drawing skills to help facilitate some of the work that I do in change management, but I am mostly just really enjoying it. I never thought I would have so much fun with it, but I feel super creative, in my very own limited way. There’s no risk of my ever making my day job out of it, but I use it to draw my own images if an article that I am writing needs some clarification or if I cannot find the right image that I am looking for. I’ve got me very own sketchbooks, markers, crayons and whatnot to make it all happen, it’s like being back in kindy! I also write reviews of books I read and then try to capture the essence in one drawing, using words and images. Maybe when I get a bit more skilled I’ll send you a few examples, right now I am mostly practicing a lot! (and boy do I need it, hahaha.)

Walking + Litter picking

I’ve stopped cycling almost completely since we moved to Altona, maybe it’s one of those phases I sometimes go through but even though I miss it, it’s just not very appealing right now. Not that I had that many more options in Brunswick, but somehow, it’s not happening and my bike seems happy to take a break for a bit. Instead, I walk. A lot. Because I am not working I am now part of the group of pensioners and other random people you can see around Altona at all hours of the day. Just walking. Minding their own business. Nothing to see here 😊. We’ve joined a group called Beach Patrol and once a month we pick litter from the beach and surrounding streets and that’s now a new habit for when I go walking too. Not every day, but very often I just take two or three plastic bags with me and within the space of an hour collect all sorts of rubbish, just lying around. It’s rewarding and useful at the same time and I am walking there anyway, might as well make the most of it, right?! Aside from frequent plastic and glass bottles, cans and soooo many tissues, I find the strangest things varying from items of clothing and headphones to many pairs of thongs and shoes (often just one) to reels of garden hose and the occasional baby diaper being thrown out. I stay away from the dead animals and poop bags but it generally takes less than 30 minutes until my bags are full, averaging to 2-3 kilos for each. I take pictures and at the end of the year will make myself a nice collage to see how much junk I kept from getting into the water and environment. I always get positive feedback from other people and sometimes see other litter pickers walking around (we keep to ourselves 😊). It gives me a whole new appreciation for nature and also made me understand that the wind, birds and the way garbage is collected have to do with litter happening. It’s always worse on collection days as the technique of some drivers is not as perfect as others, sometimes spraying litter everywhere but they clearly don’t care, just keep driving. The part that I don’t get is the people who pick up their dog’s poo, wrap it in a bag and then toss that bag to the side or into the bushes. You might as well have left it where it was then, right?! Oh well, people never cease to amaze and amuse me.

Change Rebellion

Fed up with some of the truly evil practices in Change management I’ve started the Change Rebellion. A leaderless revolution based on a few simple and honest principles that anyone in change management should be able to follow. It’s been very popular and now I am working on a toolkit to help fellow rebels create some positive change and it’s proving quite the challenge, despite the fact that all of a sudden, I am seeing rebels, ninjas, disruptors and more of that stuff all over the place. The upside of that is that I don’t feel so alone and unique (the wrong and misunderstood kind) anymore, the downside is that there’s a real challenge to bring something new and attractive. At the same time, I will make it available for free, so I don’t have to worry about making money of it. It might just happen that once I am done with that, I am stepping away from the change profession all together. It’s all just so unexciting, everybody uses the same words, talks the same talk and at the end of the day, not a lot of people are doing anything really, just expressing their support for an idea. That’s great and nice of them, but hardly how we’ll make some real change happen. I am a bit confused, disappointed and drifting myself right now and you’d probably say that I shouldn’t rush things and think carefully, so that’s what I plan to do 😊. I’ve got the framework (and even made myself a t-shirt that says ‘join the change rebellion’, yep, it’s that serious 😊) and also set myself a time frame of four weeks to do my best work on the tool kit as there’s two conferences and a few meetings that might give me new ideas, inspiration and a bit of fire in my gut again, or so I hope.

Books I’ve been reading

In my quest to understand myself and the world around me to a degree that I can actually make sense of things, I’ve been reading like never before. As I often do, I get a bit obsessive, but the good kind of obsessive because I’ve learned so much and love the sense of excitement I get when starting a new book and finding new insights. To give you an idea:

• Switch, about how change is hard work (I agree!)
• Hit Refresh, about a different way of running business (yes, please)
• This will make you smarter (ehm, I guess)
• The denial of death (that was a toughie, written in the 70’s)
• What we should be worried about (now I have more worries 😊)
• Seeing what others don’t (about shifting perspectives)
• How are we to live, on philosophy for life (very smart)
• The art of thinking clearly, about how our minds work (brilliant)
• Originals (how to be comfortably unique, very good)
• Selfie, about how we became so self-obsessed as a species
• Business bullshit (well, the title says it all)
• Rebels at work, the inspiration for my change rebellion!
• Focus, the most unfocussed book about focus ever (still fun)

I left out the really boring business books I needed to read for research and ‘work’, but after about 15 books I’m starting to see all sorts of connections and slowly but steadily a picture is starting to emerge. It’s fuzzy and I have no idea if it’s an elephant or a toaster (a big one!) but I’ll get there. I read all my books on my e-book (like a tablet) now, so I always carry around about 250 of them. It’s more practical of course, but it still doesn’t feel the same as having a paper book in your hands, flipping through the pages. I’ve got three more waiting for me (ethics, altruism and a book on technology of the future. Right now, I am reading a book on Quantum Gravity. It’s beautifully written, but very hard to understand completely as most scientist agree that no-one really understands it anyway. I just love how it makes my brain feel like it’s getting a good stretch and work out 😊.

Yumi’s job

Yumi’s busy as always, flying everywhere, doing good things for the disability and care sector. She got a new computer recently, which is pretty cool because she used to have a really old one that was about 4kgs, now it’s a very small one that only weighs about 1kg. That’s a lot better if you have to/want to carry it back and forth to work every day! There was a ridiculous thing going on with some managers in the people department wanting to make things more efficient by only celebrating birthdays on one day in a month, which caused such an uproar and flurry of activity to calm things down that it will take a lot of efficiency to earn back all that time lost, hahaha. We just laughed really hard and moved on. I am a bit worried at the signals I keep hearing from her about the organisation. They seem completely at a loss on how to stay with the times and innovate, making very poor long-term decisions to avoid looking bad on the short term. I guess you would say that not much has changed since your working days, haha. My worry is more that Yumi has all these great ideas and works really hard to make them happen with help of her colleagues, but the senior management team is really out of touch, not seeing opportunities right in front of them and not supporting her while she has the real solutions that would get them out of trouble and safe for the next 20 years. On the one hand I hope she keeps doing what she does, on the other I hope she’ll do it somewhere else! Well, as long as she’s happy to do it, I can only support her, so I’ll do that 😊

SES

I’ve settled in a bit more at Altona SES and have been on a few jobs, cutting up trees and making the world safe from fallen branches and blocked roads. Just this week I went to a situation where an older ladies’ cat had managed to wedge himself stuck between a shed and a fence. He was a bit chubby, but the fence was really leaning in and her spraying him with water and poking him with a stick didn’t help much 😊. There wasn’t much else I could do by myself (it was 2pm, normal people were working), next door neighbours weren’t there to allow me into their yard, he was in the shade, not in pain or hurt. He did look embarrassed! My SES mates returned at 7pm that night to set him free. All’s good with the world again! There’s a big exercise coming up, it’s all very ‘secret squirrel’ but it should be fun this weekend. I’ve also found the vacuum and have appointed myself as the office cleaner, no-one wants to do it and I don’t want to sit in grime and dirt, so everybody wins. I also helped out with the Good Friday appeal, which was good fun. The CFA in the nearby town of Laverton had organised a big event and I just got to stand at an intersection with a few dressed up actors (Snow White, Mickey, Minnie, a Turtle and Bat girl, kids and a few adults loved it!) shaking tins at passing cars near the lights. Lots of laughs, appreciation and team spirit and about $36,000 raised from all combined efforts. Not bad for a days’ work from about 60 volunteers!

Being busy while not working

It’s a strange experience to be very busy while not working for an income. And I am not talking about gaming! I’ve built a new website, travelled, read lots of books, wrote a lot of blogs, applied for a few jobs (didn’t get them, thank goodness, they were horrible, but I felt that I needed to). Over the past two months I met with so many interesting and inspiring people, been to some events and had so many coffee dates at one place that staff there started to recognise me. It feels like every time I am between jobs I get busier, but also more focused and connected. Perhaps that’s what networking looks like, not sure if I am doing it right, but at least I have many interesting conversations and get to go to different places.

In two weeks from now I will be presenting at a conference which is a bit exciting. I’ll be explaining about my ideas on Fake Change and how we can do better. It will probably upset a few people, but that’s okay, it’s what I came to do. I feel a bit ambiguous about doing it. I want to say my piece, but at the same time really feel that they should have gotten it already. I almost cancelled 2x in the past few weeks, but I made myself stick with it because maybe this is the last time I will be on a stage for change management, might as well go out with a bang. And if I can inspire just one person, I think that’s a win.

Change Management Institute (CMI)

As I mentioned last time, I back with CMI and it’s every bit as fun and frustrating as I remember. The team I work with are great but at the organisation level everything moves very slow or not at all. Everybody has really big brains for thinking, but very tiny hands when it comes to doing and when they do, it’s rushed because they didn’t plan or left it too long ☹. Anyway, I feel that I need to make the effort for at least 12 months in order to really and truly declare it a loss. I’ve managed to get a real star back on the team and provided some structure and now we just get to do stuff with cool people. I really hope I can now stop writing all those emails, pfff, nobody wants to do or read that!

Deakin work and speaking

I am back again at Deakin University for the third time and just as much fun. I think I was right last time to leave when I did. 2 months down the track and they are still figuring stuff out, overthinking it and not really talking to each other outside of teams and departments. I get to do the cool stuff of doing some workshops with my favourite team and another 15 teams across the business and maybe even some coaching of a very good manager who feels she wants to be a leader (I think she is, but she allows herself to be distracted by safe little projects) It’s all going in the right direction, but my ‘boss’ Lucy is exactly like me, loves working with me because I get and share her impatience and she feels I see the world from her point of view while not being  in charge. I just like that I get to be the nice guy who can be understanding but still get staff to hurry up a bit and start owning their jobs. Just a few days of work, but I get paid very handsomely so I don’t need much😊. I also had the privilege of being a guest speaker for 90 minutes to a group of 20 students in organisational psychology two weeks ago. I could have stayed there for hours and think I had even more fun than they did, what a great group of people! If they end up in change, that would be great for the profession, some fresh ideas and perspectives. I gave them my (very unconventional) views on what it takes in today’s business to be a change manager and they really appreciated that it felt ‘real’ and not like a tv commercial for the job. I am already looking forward to the next time.

Well, that’s me nearly done, aside from the short mentions:

·       Haven’t been gaming much, despite my very cool and futuristic virtual reality headset I bought (makes it look like you are in the game). Gaming is still my best hobby, but other things were even more exciting, I’ll get to use it soon I hope

·       We’ve got a new oven! Seems a bit meh, but I love to bake and make oven dishes so when the old one got a bit dodgy and not helpful, the owner of our rental home was just great and changed it while we were in Perth. I’ve already made lasagnes, 2 apple pies and there’s plans for a carrot cake, yum!

·       I’ve bought sneakers in Australia for the first time in 4 years. You know how I have a shoe thing and they have to be just so. Well, I used to love Puma shoes and couldn’t find them anywhere. By accident we passed a store, I wasn’t looking to buy anything but then I saw them and they were on sale, so now I have 4 new pairs of shoes, including red ones! I also bought very pretty black leather business shoes at my favourite Melbourne Shoe store (McClouds). They were more expensive than the other 4 combined, but hey, they  will last me more than 5 years, so it’s a good ‘investment’, right? 😊

·       Family and friends are all as well as can be expected, kids growing and getting smarter every day, jobs going well for most, no scary health issues, so there’s lots to be grateful for.

·       We appear to have a possum living near our house. It goes on mid-nightly jogs over our corrugated roof panels, making it sound like an angry horde of barbarians is about to storm the house. but this is Altona (love it more every day) so it’s unlikely it’s actual barbarians 😊. I was up and about one early morning (3.45 am) and went outside quickly to see it just jump into the tree next to the house. It sat there looking at me like “What?!” and then went on its merry possum way. It’s like having a pet, but without the vet bills, haha.

That’s me done for now, I’ll write again in a few months, I am sure lots will have happened before Winter truly starts.

All the best, stay warm and safe,

Gilbert