With brilliant collaborator Maggie Frankel, I developed a model for creative collaboration and team development. We worked on this for the past year +. The project explores how wellness, productivity, and professional development can be furthered by activities that don’t always get valued in organizations. So with a piece of bright blue paper wrapping up an old table, we started to build an idea that became the blue table. The idea involved bring people together once a month at different times of the week to talk about things that interest them and something creative. Maybe have some snacks. All of these things met the goal of bring people together and getting more done. Instead of going harder and faster on the hamster wheel, we were slowing down and connecting with each other. We eventually wanted to share our model and so we wrote a short article about it. Every part of this collaboration was a marvelous treat.

We plan to continue this work and it’s already evolving. We decided to invite some colleagues to be involved so that we have more voices in terms of planning and creativity.