Back from Atlanta
Last week, I found the time to write an 800-word essay on my plane to Atlanta, where I would spend five days for Autodesk's annual internal technology and experience conference called TechX, hosted this year at the Hilton Atlanta hotel. (Kean wrote about the event on his blog.) I tried to sleep on my way back to Spain skipping dinner to avoid jet lag as much as possible. But that didn't help much.
It was great to meet friends and colleagues I've been working with through a screen for the past two years, especially people from the Spacemaker team who work out of Boston and Oslo. I loved presenting in person to share my team's most recent project and learning about the work of other Autodesk teams.
Even though the gist of the conference are these talks, the most important moments were the breaks—breakfast, lunch, and evening events—not for the food quality but because we got to mingle and gossip. In those moments we restored a bit of our social capital1.
As I shared last week, Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, suggests that effective remote collaboration relies in part on social capital, which, as reads a New Yorker piece titled How the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?, "[accumulates] by working in the presence of others, and [depletes] during virtual interactions." ↩
