The Handsome Team Strikes Again: We Didn’t Even Know We Were Famous

I set out for my normal 4 mile run this morning, but as I mentioned at the end of yesterday, the wind had picked up. Accordingly, the waves had really come up quite a bit and some of them were crashing over the sea wall leaving all sorts of muck on the board walk. I even got splashed a few times by them.

After my now go to breakfast (two peanut butter toasts, a banana, some watermelon, and OJ), we were off to Han Te. The driver we have this week has been very nice, and seems to know a better way to get there than some of the others we’ve had.

When got to Han Te we were able to catch the next round of their morning stand up meeting, which seemed to go a little better than yesterday. It’s great to see them actually implementing some of our recommendations and improving the way they work based on them.

I then spent some time training the girls on the material that I would be covering later that afternoon. I’m so thrilled and proud of how well they both are doing, especially Katherine. She really seemed to be picking up on not only the translation, but the meaning behind everything which is really the important piece. I really can’t imagine doing the workshops without her.

About mid-morning we got some pretty exciting news, although a bit late. A picture of the Han Te team made the top of the front page of the Qingdao newspaper — the Hansom Team strikes again! All joking aside, it’s pretty cool that the work we are doing is perceived (and really is) as such a big deal locally. It’s definitely a good feeling to be recognized making a difference.

The one scare today was that we heard that security wouldn’t approve our planned trip to Beijing we hoped to book. Hoping that it was a misunderstanding of what was allowed from a CSC program perspective, I sent a note to the program manager for clarification and fortunately, we would get good news right before bedtime that she would be ok with our weekend trip.

The five of us went back to the same place for lunch today to get out of the office and because the food was good and reasonable. Today we got the same sweet and sour pork along with some really good peanuts and chopped peanut and veggie dishes. Wanting to make sure we followed the local traditions, we also had a pitcher of some pijiu.

Today was the last day of the Design Thinking workshops which equated to the last of my major presenting activities for the week. We had to start a bit late because they had quite a bit of real work to do, but that still left plenty of time to cover the important parts of the material I wanted to. We first prioritized all of the ideas that the team came up with. They voted on feasibility and importance to create a prioritization grid.

We then moved onto hills where we define an actual achievable goal for the highest priority idea. This was where things really started to get interesting because we then started to actually be able to hear concrete details about what they had brainstormed. I could know start really getting into questions like, “How is this actually able to help the customer? It sounds like it’s really meant to help you.” Fortunately, I had our girls to ask the probing questions to really get them thinking about the user. This exercise definitely took a little longer than normal because there was quite a bit of rework (and the challenge of not being able to read Chinese). However, the end result was really outstanding. We ended up with some really great hills that would actually really help the real customers thry identified as personas.

Today was also a day for good news for both Matthias and I. He found out that he got a great grade on his paper he was worried about. And I found out that I received a Lead2Succeed award from my General Manager.

To celebrate, Matthias offered to take Maria and I out for a round of drinks at the local Chinese restaurant. We tried a few new dishes as well, which weren’t our favorites, but they were still good and ridiculously cheap.

It had been a really long day, but I needed to work on the presentation for the Community Service event, so Rafael and I got together in the team room to go over the presentation that I put together earlier that day. By the end, we both felt comfortable with the plan for the weekend. I’m sure what we picked out will work well… I just feel a bit bad for our PAs since both Matthias and I will be the ones presenting so they’ll be on the hook to translate.