At work today, the busy and transactional nature of projects create a short term mindset that sometimes blocks us from seeing beyond our daily and weekly tasks and deliverables. At times it can be difficult to discuss topics as the environment made up of people, time, place and practices has not been intentionally created to enable open conversations.

The ability for people to feel welcomed to share about their needs and the outcomes they seek from the conversations. An environment that feels encouraging and where there is a collective benefit as a result of the conversations themselves. Open conversations are an important way for people to express, share their opinions and discuss the whys and underlying intentions of their positions on topics.

In this session we will explore the barriers to being open and the opportunities for better conversations through having an open mindset through awareness. We will discuss the practices needed to grow awareness and what helps to inform it.

We will discuss how to listen to other perspectives on consideration of multiple opinions that result in collective action. We will look at how framings can help nurture an open mindset in connection to the words, actions and impact we wish to have on the people we interact, connect and relate to.

We will explore how to help people look beyond their day to day work tasks by developing a set of meta questions to drive explicit meaning at work. We will help you draft a journal including a learning portfolio to identify topics and themes we can both be leading and teaching and learning together.

What will I learn:

Identify how to:

1. Promote self directed learning to encourage a spirit of curiosity.
2. Do Practice Spotting on work stories to spark curiosity.
3. Use curiosity to confront difficult situations to help see and plan forward.
4. Use stories to encourage and harness curiosity about people, time, place and practices in the projects.
5. Clarify through questions to help open framings in conversations.
6. Build confidence in your thinking from being to becoming to make more meaningful decisions.

Audience

The following audience will benefit as follows:

• Leadership - who influence people and cultures on goals, mission and vision
• Product - who direct teams to deliver on key use cases
• Operations - who create structures for optimising work relationships in projects
• Communications - who want to connect inside and outside organisational directives to realise meaningful outcomes
• Sales & Marketing - who want better understand customer expectations and needs
• Customer Support - who want to optimise conversations with customers and partners for longer term and sustainable relationships

Facilitators & Hosts

Michael Ong (The Collab Folks)

Michael has spent 20 years consulting in the tech space, delivering a spectrum of projects for Mobile Payments, Logistics Tracking & Surveying, Cleaning Inspection, Merchant Monitoring, Online E-Commerce and Real Estate Portals.

He works with startups to MNCs in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Australia, Denmark & Lithuania. These relationships have helped sharpen his skills to facilitate effective interactions with stakeholders, management, project teams and customers.

Michael specialises in helping companies and product teams with product strategy and development, agile practices and user experience. His passion lies in full-stack development and being Agile. He enjoys the challenge of studying real world problems and working together with a team that has the same ideals and vision.

His versatile approach helps guide teams to grow together to deliver business value.

Daniel Szuc (co founder of Make Meaningful Work)

Dan is a co-founder and principal at Apogee and co-founder of Make Meaningful Work, as well as the co-founder of UX Hong Kong.

He has been involved in the UX field for over 20 years, and has been based in Hong Kong for over 20 years. Dan has lectured about user-centered design globally. He has co-authored two books including Global UX with Whitney Quesenbery and the Usability Kit with Gerry Gaffney.

Josephine Wong (co founder of Make Meaningful Work)

Jo is a co-founder and principal at Apogee and co-founder of Make Meaningful Work, as well as the co-founder of UX Hong Kong.

Jo grew up in multicultural Hong Kong, with a Chinese-Burmese father and Chinese-Indonesian mother. She collaborates with global teams conducting research in Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

Jo is passionate about the environment, political and economic systems and how we can live healthier and happier lives while not adversely impacting less fortunate people.

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