100 Coffees – so what?

In December 2022 I set myself the challenge of having 100 Coffees with 100 people over the course of 2023. This week I hit that target. So what have I learned from this experiment where the only hypothesis was “something interesting might happen”?

The discomfort of a good book

A few years ago, in the era Before Covid, I was at an event organised by Julia Hobsbawm at the Ivy Club in London’s Covent Garden. There were many interesting folks there including the then New Statesman journalist Stephen Bush.

There was a conversation about working from home, and Stephen was describing how he felt that reading a book at work in the office was a very discomforting thing. So much so that he felt he had to go home if he found he needed to read a book.

The irony? Of his many roles at the time, one was as a book reviewer for the title.

Speaking to him since, and now his career has progressed to the much larger Financial Times, he finds he is able to read quite happily in their offices.

He told me “at a smaller place, where I had to do at least three people’s jobs, I felt I was slacking by doing my job, whereas now rightly entirely unashamed of using my time to do my job.”

This idea that people are discomforted by doing things at work that they feel somehow are not work-like but are necessary to their work has been intriguing me for a number of years. First time around with my research that developed The Play Cards, and in the last eight months with my 100 Coffees experiment.

I’m coming to the conclusion that organisations are struggling to be able to adapt to the contemporary world of work in large part because the very skills and activities that they need people to perform we have been socialised into believing are not things we should be doing at work.

That might be because they just don’t seem like things fit for the work environment or, even worse, because they are enjoyable. And heaven forbid that we should find ourselves enjoying work. This is, literally, the Weberian concept of The Protestant Work Ethic.

Hybrid working and relationships

100 Coffees started off because of conversations we were having at Equal Experts about what a relationships business needed to do to react to the post-Covid hybrid world of work. Before the pandemic (and before I had joined the company) relationships were forged and strengthened through the happenstance of people being in the same physical spaces – client offices, coffee bars, restaurants and bars.

A generation of our clients are starting to see a glimmer of retirement on the horizon, but if we are no longer working in person (and getting people to commit to meeting at particular places at particular times seems to be getting harder) how will we build relationships with the next generation of our superfan clients?

I could also see myself getting increasingly locked into my office at home – my clients were mostly virtual working, and there weren’t really many reasons to go into our small office in Farringdon very often. I’d learned over the course of Lockdown that I was much more introverted than I maybe had given myself credit for, but also that I really appreciated the space and privacy of working from home. One-to-one conversations over video calls could be so much more candid away from prying eyes and ears in an office.

What would happen, I wondered, if I set myself the target to have 100 coffees over the course of 2023 with 100 different people? One-hour conversations that went where the participants took them. No agenda. No predetermined outcomes. Talking for the sake of talking.

I put word out through my various social networks, collections of people who I’ve taken great care and effort in pulling together over the last 20 years, and waited to see what happened.

Eight months later, this week I had my 100th conversation. I’ve spoken to people across four continents. I’ve met over 40 strangers. Just over half were in person, the rest online.

Some people had come along wanting to explore a specific topic with me, others were curious about the project. Some people I hadn’t seen in ages, a few I see nearly every day. Nobody tried to sell me anything (at least to my knowledge). 

Some people asked me lots of questions, others I did the questioning. With many the conversation flowed like a tennis ball, back and forth. Online or in-person, there was complete focus on one another. 

Actually, that’s not entirely true… in one I was utterly distracted by the thought that I had lost the key to my brand new electric bike. Jeanine, I’m truly sorry for not being 100% in our conversation, and I owe you another coffee.

We talked about all sorts of things. Some of them related  to questions about the world of modern work, some to ideas of technology. Quite a few people talked about adult diagnosed neurodiversity (is saying yes to coffee a trait for ADHDers?).

One person explained I should never wear black near a beehive.

There wasn’t a single one of the conversations online where I thought “This would be so much better in a coffee shop”. There were plenty of coffee shops where I thought “Oh boy, I’ve got to an age where background noise is an issue”…

The long nose of hybrid

If there is a big theory that comes out from this exercise, it’s that whilst the modern narrative seems to be that Covid caused the explosion in hybrid, in reality this stuff has been a long time in the making, and hybrid has been creeping towards us throughout my career (and so therefore throughout the whole careers of most people who work today).

Hybrid wasn’t caused by the pandemic, and it wasn’t caused by the internet. It wasn’t caused by the desire of organisations in the 2010s to reduce real estate costs in Europe, or travel costs in the USA. It wasn’t caused by outsourcing. It wasn’t caused by offshoring or near-shoring. It wasn’t caused by matrix management. It wasn’t caused by cloud computing or software as a service or video conferencing or home broadband. It wasn’t the result of smartphones or laptops or ubiquitous wi-fi.

All of those things have conspired to mean that hybrid virtual working models have been all around us in big corporations for 30 or more years, and the pandemic pushed often smaller businesses who were “all in the office” out into homes. And in doing that they found that they could.

The pandemic work lockdown would have been a very different proposition ten years ago before ubiquitous cloud collaboration tools like Office 365, or twenty before widespread home broadband. The timing was fortunate.

But as “everyone in the office working for the same organisation” has been eroded steadily in the last 30 or more years, our methods of working haven’t kept up. We used to be tacitly socialised into how to do the liminal bits of a job, the bits between the “work” work. The trips to the canteen or the coffee shop or the smokers’ corner. The way to have chit chat walking to or from a meeting room. The stuff that meant businesses worked.

That liminal stuff wasn’t working before the pandemic, and has been becoming less and less effective as time has passed. The idea that my children will need to go into an office to learn how to do the liminal stuff of 21st Century work when their lives are a mash-up of social networks, online games and face-to-face contact is ludicrous. Businesses should be asking them for help.

The gaps that have been left, and have been gaping for years, aren’t being filled. The technology companies who proclaim to have filled the gaps with their online virtual collaboration spaces are some of the loudest voices claiming that the solution is to merely demand everyones’ bodies back in specific places because then magic will somehow happen.

But people haven’t all been in the same offices now for ages. Hybrid work has had a very long nose, and the office as a thing will have a very long tail. A bit like the fax machine. Super useful for ages, then less so, then niche then all but disappeared until you hear that some people are still using the bloody things even today.

This doesn’t mean never in-person

This isn’t a diatribe against people meeting in person. Far from it. I’ve spent over 50 hours this year specifically meeting people in person just for the sheer thrill of meeting people in person.

But just putting everyone into spaces designed for another age, when some if not all of their colleagues aren’t in the same place (for one of many reasons), just in case the liminal gaps might be filled by something isn’t a strategy for fixing how we work.

We need to purposefully bring people together, allowing them to interact in ways even if they are intentionally unintentional. Otherwise what you will do is to force people to travel in order to sit at desks all day on video calls that they would be able to do as, if not more, effectively from somewhere else (a home office, or a co-working office close to their home).

But the sorts of things we need to do? Well, that’s where Stephen’s book-reading discomfort comes in. The sorts of things that we need them to do will, for many, be really unsettling.

Things like carving out two hours each week of a forty-hour working week, to have conversations without agenda.

How have we got to a point where this feels like such an impossible commitment for so many people? I think there are a few things at play…

The Protestant Work Ethic

Weber’s idea was that to get to heaven, essentially work should be a burden. We talk about work/life balance, but not “having a life at work”. The idea that work should be unpleasant – well, just look at the way that the American idea of describing “pay” as “compensation” is increasingly familiar in the UK. To be compensated, not paid…

The tyranny of Outlook transparency

For the modern organisation to run, knowledge workers time is transparent. Every minute of every working day is visible to all, and it has to be like that because we got rid of the people who used to manage diaries (unless you are very important).

Turn off global access to your calendar and everyone will wonder what you are up to. You can’t win.

The resurrection of scientific management

If it can’t be measured, it isn’t valued. That’s the prevailing culture in most businesses today where measurable cost is seen as more important than outcomes. That’s why so many organisations had started down a hotdesking/home working path in the last decade in the first place.

Bring all of this together, and we have people feeling guilty even beginning to contemplate doing things that they can’t immediately explain why they are doing, especially if those things in any way should bring a modicum of enjoyment to their working lives.

So what?

I have no grand answer to this, other than to suggest that maybe you too should start to carve out some time in your working day to be experimenting with being intentionally unintentional.

Go for a coffee.

Take a stroll.

Read a book.

Go for lunch with someone.

Take some time to actually say thank you to someone who deserves some praise.

Introduce people to one another because you think they might enjoy each others’ company.

Sit and stare.

Why? Because something interesting will happen. Maybe not straight away, but interesting things will happen. And you might even enjoy it.

What next for 100 coffees?

Well, I’m going to continue the practice. Open invitations to meet for an hour without agenda, whether online or in person. Making space in my diary to have one or two such conversations each week. Documenting thoughts about the conversation publicly (but anonymously) after the event on my blog. 

Another 100 coffees in the next 12 months? Hopefully, but maybe just committing to celebrating each century as they arise. I’ve been Weeknoting for 13 years, so I see this as another Working Out Loud practice to add to my repertoire.

In the coming months I have more coffees booked in (and if you are interested in catching up, feel free to book a slot below:

There is talk about taking 100 Coffees on the road to California in November – watch this space for more details on that!

And finally we are working on a polished “How to have coffee” guide that should be available from Equal Experts very soon.