Done Right: Canadian ADE Academy 2024. Thank you.

Space-making comes before sense-making.

That is, one needs room to think in order to be able to think.

These days,  it feels like it’s getting harder and harder to make space because the signal:noise ratio is at an all-time low. Almost everything is noise, as the legendary designer, Dieter Rams, said.

Of course, I mean more than noisy sounds. Each of our senses and our psyche or spirit, too, detect their own kind of noise. 

It takes a lot of effort, now, to push all the noise aside. When I was a kid, my friends and I lived next to a great field of tall grass. All it took to make space was to lie down in it and swing your arms and legs like you were making a “snow angel.” The field is now a pair of condominiums. 

We space-out when we are out of space. 

This is why we have retreats, like the Canadian ADE Academy in Monetbello, Quebec this week: we need to get away from all the commotion.

Too often retreats–workshops, academies, institutes, call them what you will–are over-programmed; big menus of back-to-back presentations and workshops which become as noisy as the world I stepped away from.  

But the Apple people who on put this academy–Rob, Shawn, Val, Marina, Gabrielle, Lisa, Jaclyn and team–had the courage and strength to hold space open for us ADEs who attended. They brought us to beautiful Montebello, fed us like it was an Italian wedding (which means plenty, tasty and healthy), and, what we most appreciated, dialled back the talk sessions and gave us big blocks of time to work with each other on our projects.

I say courage and strength because it takes fortitude to “think different”, to resist the pressure to fill an agenda. Events cost money and time and in the planning stage the only way to demonstrate value to those holding the purse strings is to say, “look at all the things we are going to do!”

But the measure of success for an event is not inputs. It’s not outputs either. It’s the experience itself. Work is a process driven by practice and experience. Once we embrace this, like the Canadian Apple team did, our best work emerges.