TGS Digested Week 18

Monday 2021.5.3

One of the hidden advantages of the repeated lockdown and curfews this year is that we have discovered new places to sit in the home office (garden) that we never took the time to explore before. One of our lockdown spots, particularly good for sundown emails is right next to ‘the big pile of leaves and branches which, since the recent discovery of the hedgehogs living inside has turned from being an embarrassing stack of garden rubbish that should be disposed of to a nice place to sit and watch the hedgehog come out and shuffle about.  Some ‘most common hedgehog causes of death’ research (quick Wikipedia click) revealed the surprising news that many of them are poisoned by slug pellets. We put chemical slug pellets to get rid of slugs and then the hedgehogs (who eat the slugs) are killed by the slug pellet-filled slugs. If we didn’t put down slug pellets the hedgehogs would eat the slugs and we wouldn’t have to buy slug pellets. How many more aspects of our business lives are we shooting ourselves in the foot like this? This is why TGS is a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact. We want to help businesses become better for themselves and better for hedgehogs 🦔.

Today was dominated by preparations for the TGS Regional Events – one of the highlights of our year. We did find time to publish a superb article about the lesser talked about effects of Brexit…and you can read that here.

Tuesday 2021.5.4

I love meetings but you can have too many if they are all sitting down, all in the same place, and all very taxing on your brain. Tuesday was quite the day of meetings: TGS Board meeting, Team meeting, Potential Member Meeting, Production Meeting, Intern Meeting, TGS Walks Around the World Project Meeting, and then another Potential Member Meeting. I wonder if we can do some of our meetings walking. There are sometimes so many meetings that you can forget to take breaks or exercise. Can you factor in a 5-minute chunk of a break in your meeting to make sure you stay alert, focused, and creative? It doesn’t have to be much. Taking exercise breaks is really important so it’s great that we are moving closer to making concrete the ‘TGS Walks Round The World project. It’s easy to keep going and keep going and to power through to-do lists but it is often counterproductive if you do not take breaks and exercise.

Wednesday 2021.5.5

Car tire blowout. Very surprising event and happened when it’s the most inconvenient, driving with a car full, full full of stuff and giving a lift to a child who had to be in a place at a particular time. It ended up being a great learning experience for the child who turned out to be big enough to help change a wheel on the car and we meet some new people. We have this experience often at work when our technology does not work in one way or another, or it doesn’t work the way we expect and it’s often a good idea to look where the learning experience is as we are being shaken out of our predictable ruts. And we are very predictable! This is why AI-based technology is so powerful and seems like magic. Machine learning can often learn our habits so quickly and seamlessly that it feels like magic. ‘Other people that bought product X also liked product Y.’ Wow! How did they work that out? On a more human note, we are also experts in our professions and with years of learning and expertise we can often seem like magicians to our clients and that’s a great thing to be.

Marcela published the 2020 Communication on Progress. It’s a fantastic-looking document this year and you can see the progress we are making towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We’re a long way off but as the famous Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets done.” and we’re measuring our progress towards achieving the SDGs. You can download our 2020 COP here.

Thursday 2021.5.6

Exhausted. Day One of the EMEA regional event and the launch of TGS Walks Round the World. 3 solid hours of conferencing and then 2 hours of a ‘marathon’ walk with the TGS team. We did it on time! Well, Sophie managed to get the walking project up and running on time. What an amazing job of organization. You can read all about it in the TGS Walks Around the World launch article here.

Friday 2021.5.7

Day Two of the EMEA conferences. You will be able to read the summary of what happened at the regional conferences next week because we have more to go. Monday 10th and Tuesday 11th next week we carry on to Asia Pacific (on Zoom) and then on the 27th and 28th May we head on to the Americas. Normally we would be should be in New Delhi for the Asia Pacific conference and in Miami for the Americas. It’s impossible to do other than Zoom for the moment and we are happy to hear that all our members are staying safe. We look forward to seeing them in real life next year and the year after! Have a great weekend.