A Month of Disruption

As the new guy on the Curative team of awesomeness and social splendour, one of the things I’ve noticed is that you get given all sorts of interesting tasks and challenges to help prove your salt. Last week included the purchasing of a toaster (we eat a lot of muffin splits); building from scratch eight new office chairs and now I am attempting to deliver the Curative blog to fill everyone in on what’s been going on. But as always, at Curative… there’s a lot to say. 

It’s been a time of change here at Curative. The thing we discovered about growing a team is that quite quickly, surprisingly and alarmingly, you no longer fit the old mould and the office fridge you have been so harmoniously using for the past two years, no longer holds everyone’s lunch box.  Thursday 27th June saw our last day working out of the shared co-op space ‘The Kitchen’, which has been Curative’s home for the past eighteen months.

Embracing the new means releasing the old, and the Kitchen, like any good parent, has been with Curative since day one. On my mission to find good content for ye blog, I asked both Eddy and Jade what their favourite moment in The Kitchen was since they moved in back in January 2012. Jade’s was ‘camping chairs’. Apparently before they had any furniture everyone brought camping equipment in and went rookie on it until the permanent fixtures arrived. It must have been a good memory; as it’s hard not to know when Jade is happy - she’s one of those rare people who seem to smile with their whole body. Eddy’s favourite moment was the opening night party and the many shared lunches. I have known Eddy since we were kids, and she was always the first to scream ‘yes’ to the prospect of a good party – most of which she threw, suggested and catered herself. It makes me feel all warm inside to think that after all that time we’re still just big kids. My favourite memory of The Kitchen was long before I started working with Curative. One night Eddy took me and a couple of old friends up and we sat and played board games late into the night, drank red wine and looked out over the city. It was a nice time and even though I only got to spend a couple of weeks there as a worker, I knew it was a pretty special place.

So where are we now? Well, with six creative-energetics under its belt, Curative has embarked on a journey of self-discovery in its quest for a new and bigger fridge. As a temporary port we are now stationed at Movers & Shakers (down at Britomart). This place is awesome and much like the late Kitchen, is bustling with creative entrepreneurs from all walks of life.  It’s a great place to tide us over. The people are nice and they play good music. There’s also a giant, inflatable brain in the middle of the space which forms the best meeting room ever. 

We love it here, but the quest for Curatives new bomb-diggity digs will continue and I’m sure there will be lots of new exciting updates to follow in the coming months. The only downside to Movers & Shakers is that we sit almost directly atop the best French bakery this side of Toulouse, and if we don’t move soon they will be rolling me down the stairs and out the door. 

So what have we been doing besides carrying our office from one side of town to the other? If you’re reading this blog, I’ll expect you’re not a stranger to social change and the idea of business for good? Well I can tell you right now that I’ve never seen these principles more alive and kicking than in the past month. We have snuggled up with some pretty amazing projects and last week helped Leadership New Zealand organize and celebrate its most successful event to date; Dinner with a Difference. 

The Curative crew had the fabulous opportunity to help craft Dinner with a Difference; and as a fresh design grad, Aria was especially stoked to see her work come to life for the event. To put it simply the team behind this event wanted to shake things up a notch. Out went the formal invitations, orderly conduct and polite conversation of yesterday, and in came a brand new approach to leadership; and it was all about causing disruption.

It was a pretty unique experience, and most significantly the diversity of speakers is what really made the event different for most of us. It was exciting to hear insights from leaders who were just starting out like Barnaby Marshall from I Love Ugly to proven change makers like John Mccarthy from Lifewise. And at the end of the night Sir Bob Harvey reassured us all that you can often be onto a good thing when you’re “..terrified and having the most amazing time”. 

So, I guess the word of the month for us was ‘disruption’. A quick move to new digs, and an evening of Disruptive Leadership. We could have felt displaced and and chaotic, but it’s been comforting to prove the strength of our team, and know that no matter where we are, or who we’re working with, we’ll stick together, and create beautiful and meaningful work.     

xx 

Sam & Aria 

Time to eat some humble pie, and introduce you to our growing team 

When we started this little blog, we had some pretty ambitious goals. We were going to update it every week.  

We were going to share all of our learnings along the way. 
We were going to be a source of inspiration. 

Sorry if you’ve been eagerly awaiting tips or tricks from us; if you have, they’ve been sorely lacking. (We write this as we read over our most recent post… from January this year!) 

Luckily it’s a big wide web, and there are plenty of others out there who are geared up to share news, views and ideas, so we’re confident we won’t be your only source of encouragement. But, with that said, we do still want to let you in on our journey. We’re big on sharing, and we’ve learnt a lot from others, so we’d like to put our own life lessons out there, in the hopes that they’re even just a little bit useful to someone else. 

So, here goes, we’re setting some new goals. And this place will be a whole lot more active from here on out. We’re not going to shoot for the lofty ‘weekly update’ dream just yet, but we have plans to make sure that there is a little more from us here, from here on out. 

So… Why so silent?   

We’re doing our very best to write this post without including the sentence ‘we’ve been so busy’. We like to be productive, and active, and have a tonne of interesting things to do - but we really don’t want to glorify busy-ness. 

So… we’ve been active. And really productive. The first six months has been full of adventures, and we’re really proud of the work that we’ve been doing.

So with all the exciting things we’ve been doing, we’ve had to learn to let go - all over again, and in a different kind of way this time. 

We’ve had to learn that we can’t do every little thing ourselves, on every project that we work on. We’ve had to learn to share our vision, and trust others in delivering the work that we believe in. 

So, we’ve grown our little Curative crew, into our very own modern family of talented creative thinkers and doers, who share the same values that we do. They all want to put their skills to use for something bigger than themselves, and they all bring their own unique talents and experience to our team to make the projects we deliver even richer. 

So now, as part of learning to let go… again… and, acknowledging that we can’t do everything ourselves, we’re also going to share this little blog space with the whole Curative crew, and have them share all the things they’re learning along the way too. 

So, look out for updates from the lovely Sam & Aria who will be curating our creativity next month. 

Jade & Eddy xx 

“When I was one, I had just begun”
- AA Milne

The playful words of AA Milne that enchanted us all as a children, today make sense. As Curative celebrates our first year of business, it rings true that ‘we have just begun’, and we’re full of optimism and excitement about what lies ahead.

The nice thing about entering year two, is that while we’re still fresh and new, we now know that we can ‘do this’. We’re also forearmed with the lessons that our first year has taught us, and we can use this new found knowledge and experience to further shape and mould our business and our lives.

We (especially Jade) read a lot of blogs, and get a lot of inspiration from all of the learnings that others share.  Our original intention was to post all of our learnings along the way; but we got so caught up in the doing and the learning, that we ran out of time to share everything. So, our birthday gift to you, is a handful of the most important things that year one has taught us.

Love.

If you’ve been to any of our presentations or workshops (or if you know us at all), you’ll know we always start and finish by saying: ”Do what you love, Love what you do.“

We don’t say this lightly. We know that the lines tend to blur between personal & professional lives, and we’ve given up on the notion of ‘work-life balance’ in favour of ‘work-life integration’.

We spend so much time working, so it’s important to us that the environment we’re in, the work we’re doing, and the people we’re doing it with, can all be loved by us. It sounds a bit smooshy, fluffy, hippy-esque even, but the more positive energy and care that we can genuinely give something, the better the outcome, the stronger the relationship, and the more fun we have doing it.

It’s simple really, it’s much easier to get out of bed in the morning to do work that we believe in, with people we enjoy spending time with.

At our latest CreativeMornings, which followed the global theme of happiness, Friday & Andy from Running with Scissors shared the same sentiments, even going so far as saying that happiness was good for the bottom line. So, our version is that love is good for the triple-bottom line; people, planet and profit.  

Fail.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to produce consistently considered, clever, high-quality pieces of work. We like to push boundaries, to think outside the box, to embrace every creative cliche you can imagine. This pressure has the potential to be crippling; but this year we’ve learnt not to go so hard on ourselves, that we are our own worst critics, and potential failures are just an opportunity to improve.

We’ve learnt that it’s okay to get things wrong, in fact nothing will ever be perfect. We’ve learnt that sometimes it’s the things that don’t go quite to plan that teach you the greatest lessons. That it’s better to do something, and then change it, than to do nothing at all.

It was Einstein who said something along the lines of ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity’. And we don’t want to be insane. So, we always look at how we could change a process, how we could make the colours brighter, how we could organise the room in a more logical way; anything that will smooth out the kinks for the next time we tackle a similar challenge.

Celebrate.

Whether you win or lose, it’s important to celebrate the effort. A slice of cake, a glass of wine, an indulgent afternoon of pampering, a high-five, a dance-off or simply some tech-free time, we think it’s important to reward hard work, to acknowledge the people in your life, and to share the thrill and relief of completion, achievement or a personal win.  

Everyday should include a little celebration, or a little reward. Light the candles today, wear your best dress, use the good china. Every day is special.

Repeat.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far. To new friends and old, to our families, our clients, co-conspirators and collaborators, and especially to Adam and Gareth; don’t underestimate how much strength, courage and energy your belief in us gives us.

• PHOTOS: Check out the rest of the Curative’s Birthday Party photos »
• ARTICLE: Read more about our first year on The Fetch »

How much change can you make for $2.25?

A lot more when you pool your resources and work together.

How big a part does food play in your life? It’s not something we think about too much, since we have such easy access to it. But last week we came to appreciate how much food is built into our daily schedules.

Catch up with a friend? Grab lunch at a local cafe. Client meeting? Coffee and Tea please. Struggling to get through the mid-afternoon doldrums? Sugary snack to jumpstart the brain. Need to wind down after work? Glass of red.

Take those away and life start to get a little less fun. Then drastically cut your daily food intake and your ability to function becomes severely impaired. How do we know this? Well we, alongside 1400 other Kiwis, were Living Below the Line for a week, in an effort to raise awareness and funds around the global problem of extreme poverty.

Our involvement with the campaign started back in June when we helped Will and Patrick from the Global Poverty Project launch this years New Zealand Live Below the Line challenge; a campaign that has managed to get eight of the major aid organisations within New Zealand to collaborate, no mean feat.

After being immersed in the cause at the time of launch, we knew that we had to take the challenge ourselves, and live below the international extreme poverty line, on just $2.25 a day, for 5 days.  

Living on such a small amount is all but inconceivable for those of us lucky enough to be born in the Western world, but for 1.4 Billion people around the world it’s their reality. They have to survive on that tiny budget, using it to pay for not just their food but also clean water, healthcare, education, shelter, everything! The aim of the campaign is to bring an end to this extreme poverty within a generation, to help those most in need to break out of the cycle that they’ve been born into.

Now lets be clear, this challenge in no way comes close to replicating the realities of those living below the poverty line, but it did give us valuable insight into some of the day to day struggles.  

We knew it was going to be hard; that it was very likely that we would be hungry, grumpy, and sluggish. But we also knew as a team of three we could pool our resources, and lean on each for support (something that proved invaluable as we made our way through the week).

We created a very detailed daily plan for our meals, and tried to make sure that each meal was as filling as possible. We were never in danger of starving, but our struggles would be mental. Eating had to become more about survival, rather than enjoyment. Our meals, while in no way unpleasant, wouldn’t be particularly inspiring, but they would give us what we needed. We would have to deal with the fact we couldn’t just grab a snack when our stomachs rumbled, or sip a cup of tea for refreshment.

But we had no idea of the toll it would take on our workloads. The smaller portions paired with lack of sugar, coffee, and tea clouded our thoughts, slowed our responses and gave us splitting headaches.

Food also took up a whole lot more headspace than we expected. With such a strict budget, we couldn’t just grab something as we ran out the door. We had to make time to prepare and eat each of the three meals everyday. And much of the week was occupied just thinking about food too. Despite realising early on, talking about things we couldn’t have was tortuous, we couldn’t seem to help ourselves, and many of our conversations centered around that which we could not have.

As much as we complained last week, we were always brought back to reality by the fact that this is just a small taste of what life is like for a large portion of the worlds population. It’s a sobering perspective.

We finished the week with a renewed appreciation for the amount of choice we have when it comes to food, the ease of access to it, and how much we depend on it to help us get through the day.

And the challenge has proven to us once again how valuable it is to have a supportive network around you, to push you forward, help you out and bolster your efforts. Last week 1400 New Zealanders came together to let people know extreme poverty is something we can bring to an end, raising over $300,000 while we were at it.

There’s strength in numbers, and by simply working together and sharing resources, seemingly insurmountable challenges can become a lot more manageable, whether it be surviving on a tiny budget, or bringing an end to a global crisis.

The animated video that Curative’s lead crafter Kaan, produced to tell the story of Live Below The Line.

“You create your opportunities by asking for them” - Shakti Gawain

As I sit here at Heathrow airport ready to board my 30+ hour journey home to New Zealand, I keep thinking about how important it is to never wonder ‘what if’, but to instead seize every opportunity. And that sometimes, that means you need to create the opportunity for yourself, by asking for them, after all, the worst case is that they’ll say ‘no’.

It’s these thoughts that I’ve carried with me through all of my previous travels and upon reflection of the past few weeks in the UK, these thoughts are still incredibly relevant today.

My trip to London was initiated by a client of Curative’s; British Council NZ (BCNZ). They wanted us to look at an arts, culture and social innovation project; The Edible Garden as part of the Phakama: Velela pop-up festival.

An initiative we look forward to helping implement in New Zealand later in the year. Being over there allowed me to meet amazing young artists from around the world, engage with the local London creative practitioners and even inspired me to explore a bit of storytelling through performance arts workshops. However, my experience with Phakama was just the beginning…

I wholeheartedly believe, that even in an age where everyone feels more connected online, nothing can beat real life face-to-face connections. Which was partly why BCNZ sent us over, to connect, engage and learn first hand about the project and the people involved rather than being sent a well-structured strategy document about systems and processes to re-create the concept in NZ. That would’ve been too easy!

The challenging part, is really getting involved, getting your hands dirty, and getting amongst it all, clarifying the original intentions of each individual, the objectives of the project, learning about what each person brought to the table; both professionally and personally, and understanding the dynamics of the key-players of the project. Which I felt, I was able to grasp whole-heartedly while living on campus with some of the Artists in Residence.



However, it wasn’t just ‘campus life’ that I threw myself into wholeheartedly. While in that part of the world, I extended the ‘business trip’ and took the opportunity to explore the professional landscape of Design, Social Innovation and Social Design in the UK. With these interests in mind, I connected with a few thought leaders prior to arriving; and managed to set up times to meet with them.

Below is a bit of a re-cap, collection of interesting links, resources and little learnings from some of the people I was fortunate enough to meet with:

Stuart Thomason, Senior Associate at The Young Foundation; took the time to talk me through the landscape of Social Innovation in the UK, what part YF played, the innovation spiral and sent me off with a bunch of resources; this publication comes highly recommended if you haven’t already read it, you can download The Open Book of Social Innovation here.

Earlier that week, The Young Foundation was hosting a Social Design talk on Design Ethnography with Catriona Macaulay. Admittedly, earlier that day, I had no idea what Design Ethnography really was, but the end of the presentation, I was looking forward to finding out more and how we could highlight the notion here in NZ.

It was at that talk, where I met the Service Design Lead at Fjords, Noemi Mas. Who was kind enough to have a coffee and take me through their innovation process, methodologies and tools even amongst a big deadline.

I also ran into Noemi at the CreativeMornings London event with rAndom International (I guess the creative industries are small no matter where you are in the world!) Where I got the chance to meet CreativeMornings London chapter host, Drew Smith and share our CreativeMornings Auckland ‘Hello LDN’ video. An interesting, articulate, well groomed creative character that was incredibly warm and welcoming. Meeting industry leaders with extensive connections in their cities, is just one of the reasons why the CreativeMornings family is so valuable to be part of, and again reiterates this video »

Peter Holbrook, CEO of Social Enterprise UK; whom I initially met in NZ and gave a captivating presentation at The Kitchen, took the time out of his busy schedule to show me around The Firestation, meet the SEUK team as well as share insights and resources into the beginnings of setting up a similar association in NZ. Once again, I was amazed, not just by his charismatic words of wisdom, but by the physical space. In this one building, they have housed here; School for Social Entrepreneurs, PwC’s Centre for Social Impact, and The Brigade bar & bistro; here they host The Beyond Food foundation, where they are offering people who have been at risk of or have experienced homelessness the opportunity to take part in a 6 month apprenticeship programme called United Kitchen. If you’re interested in learning more about Social Enterprise NZ, contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.



Social innovation and research consultancy; A Very Good Company’s co-founder and director, Natalie Campbell, was incredibly welcoming given it was the week following A Good Week. She was even kind enough to gift me a book; which is mandatory for all her staff, contractors and interns to read before working with her; The One Minute Manager, a book by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. 

At that very meeting I also had the opportunity to catch up with; Kate Andrews, a social communications strategist and design consultant who I had been following the work of online for the past few years. We’re all pretty busy ladies, but currently exploring the potential of a collaborative project, where we can share our learnings and discourse around Social Innovation and Design. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on any developments.



And then, there were these next two serendipitous encounters. And the story goes a little like this: A really good friend of mine, Adele Barlow invited me to a launch party of General Assembly where they were setting up a London office and heard there would be some rather interesting characters there… I was right.

Despite arriving embarrassingly early, Tom Hulme, Design Director of IDEO and founder of OpenIDEO was there at a similar time too. I recognised him instantly and on my somewhat swift departure, introduced myself, snapped a pic and he was kind enough to invite me around to their studio to meet with him and his team later that week. To learn a bit more about IDEO, the Art of Innovation their widely recognised human-centred processes, and world renowned guide to designing for Social Impact. Haiyan Zhang, interaction lead of OpenIDEO was kind enough to answer a few of my niggling questions about the agency after the team from Thames & Hudson departed. In which we found out we had a mutual Kiwi acquaintance; Meena Kadri (6 Degrees of separation, that, and us Kiwis are everywhere!)



At the launch party, was also fortunate enough to meet Dees from Mozilla, where we set up a meeting the following week at their new beautiful co-working space right in the centre of town in London; (which from my understanding, Mozilla Spaces is completely free and open to the public for people to work from.) And after realising that Mozilla does much more than create the amazing web-browser Firefox, we then explored the possibility of hosting a Design Jam in New Zealand in the coming year. Again, we’ll keep you posted on any developments.



So, whether it was via phone, email, twitter, launch party or a serendipitous encounter I thought to myself that, “You do indeed, create your opportunities by asking for them.” and fortunately for me it turned out on this trip that no-one said ‘No’.

This mini-mantra has served me right not only on my travels, but day-to-day life as well. I must admit, I felt terrible having to leave Curative, just 6 months new, with the workload really starting to take off! However, I’m fortunate to have a business partner and a great friend in Eddy, who was incredibly supportive of the opportunity and saw the long-term benefits of this trip out weighing the short-term work stress. And it was with this support that I was able to throw myself into the experience fully, knock on every door, ask plenty of questions and let the opportunities open up.

So, what unexpected opportunities have you recently created for yourself by just asking for them?

But now that we have a brief moment of silence, before the next hurricane of activity consumes us, we can see just how important it is to make time to stop, to acknowledge what’s been done, what hurdles we’ve overcome, and refocus our attention, energy and learnings into the next set of projects. 

Among the list of things that kept us on our toes were four fairly significant projects. Fair Trade Auckland presented us with an exciting brief, but a very short timeframe to achieve it in. Our friends at Rainbow Youth & Outline needed to launch their WTF campaign shortly after. The Lifewise Big SleepOut needed a video shot and edited. And we needed to help British Council stage a week-long PIYN workshop with a couple of creative legends from the UK, as a side event for design conference Semi-Permanent.

The only way we were going to give all of these projects the creative energy and attention that they needed was to acknowledge energy levels, and to know when to ask for help. 

We could see our ‘to-do’ list getting longer than we could achieve ourselves, and the skill-set needed pushing our own experience, so we called in our favourite hipster and all round talented craftsman, Kaan Hiini to help us with a few things. 

Having extra resource, allowed us to be more creative, and more responsive to some pretty demanding timelines, and complex projects. And through this period, we learnt that anything is possible with the right attitude and enough energy.

And we’re lucky to have this learning under our belt as Jade heads off for a three week stint in the UK to absorb as much as she can for another British Council project. It makes it an easy, logical and exciting step to extend our team to include Kaan as a semi-permanent fixture so that Eddy isn’t left carrying the load alone.  

Together we can divide and conquer, share the load, manage energy levels and achieve anything we put our mind to.

Dear Friends -

Parliament is about to consider the Crown Entities Reform Bill which among other changes abolishes the Charities Act2005 and disestablishes the New Zealand Charities Commission.

The Charities Commission was established as an autonomous crown entity after years of consultation and discussion with the community and charity sector.

Along with managing the register of charitable entities, the Charities Commission was established to promote public trust and confidence in the charitable sector, encourage and promote the effective use of charitable resources and educate and assist charities in relation to matters of good governance and management.

However, under the proposed reform the functions of the Charities Commission would be moved to the Department of Internal Affairs, who have a lesser capacity for understanding, supporting, educating and growing the sector.

The government intends to disestablish the Charities Commission as an autonomous crown entity in the hopes of cost savings; however cost efficiencies are not guaranteed. To regulate the sector will still require staff, office space and equipment and a Chief Executive, all of which come at a cost.

Despite the argument of cost, ultimately the level of engagement and furtherment of the community sector that the Charities Commission has championed is unlikely to continue under Department of Internal Affairs, and years of interaction and progress within the sector will be un-done.

So, what can we do?

The Crown Entities Reform Bill is due to have its second reading in Parliament and be voted on in the week beginning 21 May. This is the last opportunity to save the independent Commission. This means, that the time to act is now.

To show your support for the continued work of the Charities Commission please call or visit your local MP and voice your concerns. If you’re unable to call or visit, please make the time to send a personalised letter to your MP.

To support your appeal, your conversation or letter could outline your community’s need for the Charities Commission, highlight the benefits, education, guidance, events or advocacy that the Commission has provided in the past, and the concerns you have if this support is lessened or removed.

We have one week to make sure that our united voices are heard and that we continue to be supported and furthered as a sector.

Download the Crown Entities Reform Bill here. Part 3 of the Bill covers the disestablishment of the Commission.

Thanks

Eddy & Jade

What is a social enterprise?

Here in New Zealand, this question has been discussed, debated and defined many times over without conclusion. And with so much unresolved talk in this space, many people have started to feel discouraged and disengaged with the notion.

But after listening to Peter Holbrook, CEO of Social Enterprise UK at The Kitchen late last month, it feels like there has been a shift in thinking, after he reminded us that the real meaning of Social Enterprise lies in action rather than definitions.

Peter did define Social Enterprise as: “Organisations whose stated primary objective is to achieve social impact rather than generating profit for owners and shareholders”.

However, in the hour that he spent talking with us, he focused little of his attention on the definition, instead spending most of his time on real examples.

He shared stories. He shared statistics. He shared the reality of creating change; the good, the hard and the inevitable.

He reminded us that Social Enterprise already exists here in New Zealand, and that people running organisations that achieve social impact rather than generating profit, will be just getting on and doing it; not talking about doing it.

He also reminded us that for Social Enterprise to become a recognised sector, with the attention and support that it deserves, we need to quantify the impact, record the success, and get more people right from grass-roots community to goverment and business to understand the importance of Social Enterprise.

But again, we won’t do this by simply talking about it. And we certainly won’t do it by simply defining the sector.  We’ll do it by showing people tangible change.  

This means that we need to find and champion real examples. We need to learn from what already exists both here in New Zealand and abroad. And ultimately we need to create more examples of social impact rather than profit.

And to do this, we need to be truly enterprising. We need to think like businessmen, but with the heart of the community. We need to seek out and create opportunities. And we need to invest profit into the growth of community instead of the growth of individuals.  

So let’s stop talking about the definitions, and let’s start talking about real examples. Let’s talk about the impact. And let’s create change.

Thanks to British Council and the Office of Ethnic Affairs for organising the event, The Kitchen for hosting the presentation, and Peter Holbrook himself for giving us a boost of enthusiasm and showing us that change can happen. 

Why?

It’s such an important question. Yet once we grow out of the naturally (and annoyingly) inquisitive ‘but why’ stage as a child, we often forget to ask ourselves this question as we move through our grown up lives.

As we’ve been piecing together our own website (which is coming very soon!) we stumbled on a mild brain-freeze while articulating what Curative is and how we can help. It wasn’t that we didn’t know the answers to the what and the how, it was just that the sizzle was missing.

Fortunately though, the writers block quickly came unstuck, after we were reminded of this TED talk by Simon Sinek which helped us refocus the energy of our own story into the why?  

It can be such an empowering question. If you really know why you’re doing something, it becomes so much easier to figure out how.    

Work hard, play hard, and don’t forget to keep on learning.

We are definitely not afraid of hard work, and we’re lucky to enjoy the work that we do, which makes it easy to put in the hours to deliver the polish of quality that we strive for.

But we know (and we’re often reminded by friends and family) that all work and no play, isn’t healthy. And while you need some pure play time, you also need to allow room to grow and learn.

So, how do you fit in all of the working, playing and learning to make sure that you’re living a well-balanced life?

It might seem dorky, but we have colour co-ordinated calendars marked with ‘meetings’, ‘working’, ‘playing’ and ‘learning’. It’s a little like putting together a balanced meal, with a good variety of delicious colour on the plate; we’re always trying to make sure that there is a nice mix of colour in our calendar.

And this week, is one of those precariously balanced weeks which is filled to the brim with each or our staples. (Don’t worry Mum Tang and Mum Helm, we’ve factored in time to sleep!)

If you’re in need of some play-time or some mind-food to balance your working week, join us at the Opening celebration of The Kitchen on Thursday night, or get an early start at CreativeMornings on Friday to listen to Cut Collective walk us through their Splore 2012 project.