Whirlwind of a Time in Singapore

I took a very short flight to Singapore Monday evening after my client meeting in KL. After checking into the hotel, I caught up with Brian for a bit to grab a bite to eat. I was thinking we’d do something light, but Brian had other plans.

Apparently, he had booked an extra non-refundable night at the hotel, and when they said non-refundable, they meant it. However, they did say that he could spend it on other things at the hotel, so rather than letting it go to waste, we went out for dinner. And if you happen to know Brian, he doesn’t mess around with food.

With that in mind, we went to the grill on the first floor of the hotel. Apparently, they have a massive special cut T-Bone that’s meant to be shared by two. It looked pretty darn amazing, so we decided on that. They threw this big slab of meat on a wood fired grill, sliced it up and brought it out. There’s no way that I would have gone there and ordered it on my own, but it was pretty freaking amazing.

The next day we kicked off our IBM Design Thinking workshop at the Changi office. We had a really strong turn out of close to 50 tech sellers, lab services folks, and architects. We switched things up a bit this time, i and added the Marshmallow Challenge into some of the intro charts to break things up. As expected, it was a huge hit! I was really happy with how the lessons from the exercise fit into many of the concepts of Design Thinking. After that, we had enough time to split the groups into teams and cover the basics of the case study.

For lunch, Desmond took us to get some local food (apparently there’s a debate whether it’s originally from Malay or Singapore but I digress). The specialty for this place was a pork rib soup, so I went for it. The broth itself was really flavorful, but I don’t think I’ll be seeking out the ribs themselves any time soon.

In the afternoon, we got into the full swing of things from a design thinking exercise / artifact perspective. I have to admit, facilitating these workshops is one of the most enjoyable part of my responsibilities. And unlike my CSC assignment, it is truly reality and more or less part of my real job. And not to pat myself on the back too much, but I’m pretty darn good at it too, which doesn’t hurt. I just love seeing when people “get it.” I guess that’s the teacher in me.

I can’t go to Singapore without getting chili crab, so we made sure to check that off the list Tuesday evening. Brian, Desmond, Richard, and I all were in. We had planned to go to No Signboard, but they were out of Sri Lanka crab and the other options were really pricey, so we opted to go to Jumbo instead. After all ending up at the same one (there are two in Clarke Quay), we ordered some really good shrimp fried rice, some veggies, and then the main event: a pepper crab and a chili crab.

If you’ve never had chili crab, it’s this amazing combination of a huge Sri Lanka crab (similar to dungeness) topped with a thick semi-sweet chili sauce with egg drops mixed into it. Typically it’s served with “Mantou” or a sweet lightly fried bread that you can then dip in the delicious sauce. It has to be one of my favorite dishes… period! The pepper crab is a dry dish, but they take the same crab and douse it in crushed black pepper. The two are very different, but both are delicious. Our hosts were gracious enough to give Brian and I each the two claws — which is almost like cheating. But after a little discussion, we graciously accepted. The meal was complete with a pitcher of Tiger (beer).

The next day we spent a little time to frame the whole design thinking discussion with respect to how we could actually apply it in tech sales. In particular, we talked about how design thinking could fit into the adoption of DevOps. We had a lot of good dialog and discussion with the class on their thoughts as well.

After that we picked up where were left off with Design Thinking itself, starting off with Ideation. It’s always interesting to see the variety of ideas that everyone comes up with. Some folks are definitely better at it than others, but we did manage to get quite a few big ideas (as opposed to just product features). After that we got into what sometimes seems to be one of the more challenging exercises: turning those big ideas into a tangible goal (or hill in IBM Design Thinking terminology). This is the part where the rubber really starts to hit the road for teams. And it’s sometimes challenging for them to clearly state what will be provided to the user and how it will significantly improve their experience, without getting into a technical implementation. Because of the struggles, this is where guided facilitation really needs to take place. We obviously don’t want to do it for them, but we need to ask the right questions to keep them going down the right path. You’d be surprised how long it takes to come up with one really good sentence that captures the essence of everything.

If there’s a good thing about spending a lot of time on creating the Hills, it’s that by the time the groups are done, they have a really good understanding what needs to be done for their users. Because of that, when we went through story boarding, there was much less “bloodshed” as one team put it.

After we wrapped up the rest of the day, Brian and I had a short debrief with Adam to talk about how we could scale this out in the region and how to identify some local leaders to drive everything. We then went back to the hotel and said our goodbyes. We both had early flights in the morning, and I was stuffed from the ridiculous amount of Chinese food I got at lunch for the equivalent of $4.

Also since I was heading back the next day, I figured I might as well start getting on the right sleep schedule, so I went to bed right then and was able to sleep from about 6:30PM (or 5:30 AM at home) until just after 1 local time. I then got up and proceeded to do everything that I would have done the rest of the evening had I stayed up.

I went and haggled at the local Kebap shop to get some late dinner — or perhaps now breakfast) with the remaining Sing dollars I had left. I didn’t want to go to the ATM for such a small amount, so I was glad I was able to make it work.

I then went to the gym and ran on the elliptical machine and read on my Kindle for an hour at 2 in the morning (thank you Hilton for 24 hour gym access!) After showering and spending a bit more time in my room bumming and packing up, it was time to go for real breakfast (now lunch?) before rushing to the airport. Breakfast started at 6 and my flight was at 8, so I did need to hurry.

A four hour flight to Hong Kong leaves me in the airline lounge where I just finished up this post up. Just another 15 hour flight (and then 1 hour flight) between me and being home! Here’s to uneventful travel!

Have a fun travel story to share? Let me know @TalkToErik.