Thoughts from Away Day

Topic: “Thoughts from Away Day”

Example ideas:

• What was your favorite presentation?
• What do you think the purpose of Away Day is?
• What will you take to your project?
• What do you think you/we can do to make active change on SIP issue [X]?)

Alyssa Nabors

2013 Away Day was my first experience EVER with ThoughtWorks outside of the interview process. It blew me away then, and it did the same this year! I really enjoy the opportunity to get in touch with ThoughtWorkers I haven’t seen for a while and get the chance to meet more, old hands and brand new! I couldn’t stop talking about how brilliant the selfie quest app was- gamification of networking, with a picture dictionary of the ThoughtWorkers you met!

(gif source: http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n527/The44thHour/DWBrilliant.gif)

As someone who has had the opportunity to engage in multiple roles on different projects, I had quite a time deciding with breakout sessions to attend. I ended up choosing mostly sessions that contributed to my pet-project-necessitated skills: UI design. However, I also made time to attend an informal Crucial Conversations workshop, as I am always striving to improve my consultant-specific toolset. One session actually bled into both areas: a talk on rational design, which touched on how we become attached to our ideas very quickly and can lose sight of what the actual best solution might be. A book that was recommended to me by the speaker if I really wanted to “geek out on the subject”: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

One thing I really want to see come back next year is the Haymarket book table. Everyone who saw me at Away Day knows they got quite a bit of my money. And with good reason! With books like No One Is Illegal, Men Explain Things to Me, and Brazil’s Dance with the Devil, there were plenty of ways to read up on many of the issues we touch on in our P3 endeavors.

Aubrey Chipman

I had a number of take aways from Away Day.  Here are some of them:

• I need to watch/ hear more of the speeches of Civil Rights Activists.  The ones we saw were full of force and determination, and I want more. 
• Websites are not built for people with screen readers.  Either we need to make a better web interface, or we need to make better screen readers.  Possibly both.
• I met so many people!  Taking selfies with others worked wonderfully as a way to run rampant with taking photos, a way to get close to people you haven’t made friends with yet (and then you have!), and a way to encourage a little competitive spirit in the get together.  
• I want to make a responsive site starting with mobile-device display size first, to allow for growth of content according to viewing size.  This seems like an under-utilized, good design pattern to follow. Check it out.
• We can all become better story-tellers.  I wish the workshop on this was longer, as it was applicable to all of us as positive-change-driving consultants.  

Linda Goldstein

#NAAwayDay is too nuanced an experience to describe to completion, but here is some stuff...

1. My favorite part was seeing all the great people I’ve worked with. I think that Away Days get more meaningful the more of them you attend.
2. I think that the "Selfie App" was a brilliant idea, well executed. I saw many ThoughtWorkers using it as an icebreaker for interacting with our thought leaders like Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons. It was an engagement enhancer for many TWers, it produced some hilarious collateral, and it made great memories. There was even a Beryllium selfie onstage! It is one of my favorite tweets from the #NAAwayDay twitter stream.
3. ThoughtWorks TechOps ran a flawless remote keynote (with remote Q&A!) This is a communications achievement that many of our projects arrive at inconsistently and with great effort. I am very impressed.
4. What can ThoughtWorkers do about these causes we have heard about? We are told - you can read this book. Buy this t-shirt. It is a drop in the bucket, and there are a lot of buckets. It is not fulfilling to put one drop in these one or two buckets. Which drop? Which bucket? I think that you have to pick a cause that “speaks to you” and put most of your drops in that bucket.
5. TW is not perfect at internal communication, or at living up to every one of our ideals all of the time. I think that Away Day helps us unify and become more aware of where we are not internally ligned with ourselves.