rays of light: 2018 experiment

22 Jan 2018

back in 2016, when danielle coates-connor and i worked together at the interaction institute for social change (iisc), we developed a practice called rays of light. in short, it was a daily, morning meeting in which we each shared:

• something that we were grateful for in that moment (“a ray of light” in life right now)

• the top tasks on our work plate for the day

• anything that was blocking us from moving forward in work. blocks ranged from the internal (things like resistance to doing something we felt not good at) to environmental (#snowpocalypse2016) to interpersonal (i need [a certain file or decision] from [this particular person or people] so that i can finish producing [some thing that’s my responsibility to produce]) and beyond.

we found that, over the course of us working together, that rays (as we called the meeting) became a critical part of our team infrastructure. without it, we noticed much that was missing and with it, work flowed more smoothly on several the dimensions of success (process, results, and relationship).

rays of light: our team felt more connected to each other because we knew what was making each other feel grateful. it was also helpful on the individual level because the practice of finding something everyday to be grateful for is often a transformative practice in and of itself.

tasks: we found that the practice of explicitly listing our tasks each day to another person helped us in several ways. it helped us understand our own work better and, at least for me, the practice of having to share my work with someone else made me be more planful about what i was going to do each day.

blocks: knowing what was blocking your each other was also super helpful. reflecting on what was blocking me was in itself a powerful practice. i had to look at myself, daily, and be real about what was blocking my forward movement. it was also amazing to have collective time to share blocks, especially because if one of us was blocking the other, we had a low-stress way to surface that and then know how to re-prioritize our work so that we weren’t blocking each other.

---

from time to time, we shared rays with other people we were working with. when we had interns, we’d loop them into rays. or sometimes when we worked closely with other people at iisc or contractors, we’d often try to include them because it just made work flow more easily.

anyways, i say all this to say that we’re experimenting with expanding rays this year. if you’re up for joining in with us, let us know on this quick little form and we’ll send you info. we’re hoping to get 10 people to join in with us on this so we can get good data on how this works (or not) for others.

feeling excited and nervous!!!

words / writing / post-processing
476w / 18min / 7min