BYO

Posted by Adele Liddle on 12 September 2011 | 0 Comments
Tags: Radical Redesign Team

Bring your own. First reflections from another new Radical Redesign team mate.

 

I've been unemployed this year. There's been a few fleeting glimpses of fortune: a cards and gifts expo, serving indian street snacks once, and I had a bit of input into a family hi-fi business building plan - but just snippets with folks I know really, or in volunteering.

Inevitably there's been complexities: seemingly endless searching, rejection, bouts of woe, anxiety, conflicting emotions, big existential questions, discoveries ... just like life with a job, but with different digging-in bits.

Luckily being wageless didn't matter for the TACSI job application. It wasn't work status, or even qualifications that got their interest. They wanted to know about all that stuff that's cultivated your senses and now influences your thinking. And the perspective and attitude you therefore might bring to their way of social change.

There was no call for the usual tired regurgitations in 'time management prowess' in response to cri(sic)teria. You answered six questions (in any medium - video, song, madly dancing with hairbrush should this be a passion - as it is for us all, but I went with words and photos) about who you really are, where your experiences and mistakes had led, and why this made you want to learn.

This week I joined the Radical Redesign team, and it's full of those shivery 'firsts'. First blog post, first teammate (five more coming in October), and first exploration into services from a first day spent spotting the differences - the unintentional interactivity in the museum, the ticketed greeting w a i t in the more systemic offering, and just what makes the hotel reception inconscipuous and omnipresent?

On Friday we lunched with a local visionary, Raymond Spencer, and he shared, along with memories from not-for-profit and entrepreneurial endeavours in India (and beyond), his own belief that knowing what we already know is sometimes just the magic that's needed.

And it's interesting to think this job could be about having the courage to understand this, and how I might bring my own experiences to help reveal new insights. And imagine how all sorts of different life experiences are going to be transformed into new kinds of roles, jobs and outcomes in work we do together.