Work’s Better When You’re Having Fun

I wanted to give my legs a bit of a break so I skipped the run this morning and did a quick Beachbody workout in the room instead.

At Han Te, we got there just in time to watch a bit of their new stand up meetings. After doing so, we definitely had some feedback, but we didn’t get the chance to discuss that today.

Matthias and I finally had a chance to sort out a bit more of the order of the content that we were going to cover for the week. He and I spent the rest of the morning helping to scope out how Han Te could lead implement a tool to help manage some of their processes.

I talked quite a bit about the importance of people, process, and technology. If you implement the tool without training the people on how to use it or implement a supporting process that encourages its use, it’s likely to fail. Along with this, there was a pretty heated discussion around which features of the tool to implement and when. We were going to see what the tool looked like, but there were some technical challenges with Jat’s laptop that didn’t let us actually see it.

We decided to change things up today for lunch, so we walked out to a local place right down the street. It was cafeteria-family style where you chose the dishes and then shared among everyone. As is pretty typical here we had a glass of beer with lunch.

When we got back in the afternoon, we picked up where we left off with Design Thinking. The Han Te folks came back energized and you could just see that they were excited to be there today. Lots of smiles, laughs, and good ideas because of it. It was interesting to see the difference in their demeanor from when we originally got there and this afternoon. Today was really a great and fun day with them.

Traffic was pretty bad going back, so we didn’t have much time before the team meeting. Matthias and I went over to Carrefour to pick up some snacks for dinner. I picked up a bread with cream cheese in it at the bakery in the underground tunnel which was really delicious.

We grabbed a couple of beers to take to the team meeting and then headed down. The big group got together and talked briefly about their project statuses, and then really focused in on what we would be doing for the community service event coming up on Saturday. I got volunteered to take over the Design Thinking piece that we now plan to do given that Bluemix was not working well here with the Internet situation. It’s something I’m already familiar with, so it wasn’t a big deal at all.

Then Matthias walked us through how to run through the Marshmellow Challenge. Since he was running it, Karen joined Maria and I to try it out. The biggest challenge for us was that our tape picked up a bunch of felt from the tablecloth which meant it wasn’t sticky. Maria was tying little knots while Karen and I held things in place. In the end, we got 2nd (out of 4) which wasn’t too bad. On the plus side, our tower was probably the most stable.

Since I didn’t go running this morning, I went out for a walk in the harbor before calling it a night. The wind had started to pick up a bit, so it was a great evening to get out after a really long day.