Latest Unthinking - January

Our newest Unthinker, Japanese agency, 1 graphic and 3 highlights from the last 4 weeks🚀

Are you ready?

Thanks to these three, we had a hat-trick of reasons to celebrate our first team day of the year (today).

Tom Mitchell on his first day at Unthink, Sarah Thomas turns 31 and Professor Adrienne Milner celebrating her British citizenship (explaining the tights, hopefully)!

You know who the second two are, so a quick word on our newest member of the team…

Tom, father of one (soon to be two), led Team GB rugby 7s to Olympic silver at Rio 2016 and bronze at Commonwealths 2018 as their captain, and now joins Unthink full time. Welcome, Tom!

We’ll do a ‘get to know’ video or post at some stage… Questions are in the making. What would you like to know about Tom?!

Agency frequently pops up in conversation at Unthink.

We love it when we come across someone with high agency.

It’s our highest level of complement to be honest. Whether participants in learning experiences, the L&D folk in our network or even venue hosts, they have a bias for action and seem to get shit done.

High agency people leave evidence of their capability, they don’t talk about it. They’re resourceful and humble.

Our Love Sundays, Again campaign centered around rewarding someone who has high agency - someone who wanted to make a change for themselves. They had to be brave to apply and want better.

Last week, Sarah shared the Unthink menifesto. It’s the Unthink way. It was hard-hitting reminder of why Unthink exist. Maybe one day that will be shared in full but for now, I’ll share one section from it.

Talking about what makes us win, the memo described Japanese agency.

Adding on to all the typical high agency traits described above, the Japanese add another layer of selflessness.

There is an unwritten rule in Japan, those who arrive early to work park further away in a parking lot for those who arrive late to have a space and make it on time.

Eddie Howe, the football Manager, fines players who park front on into parking spaces.

The idea being that parking front-end in indicated you’re running late, and don’t have time to reverse in.

The intended behaviour is for players to arrive early, with plenty of time to reverse in carefree.

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See you again in Feb!

Team Unthink 🫶

Graphic of the month: