As summer kicks in, many of us will have breaks scheduled and some of us will be getting on trains and planes to visit destinations further afield. Even before more recent concerns about carbon footprints, being a "tourist" or doing "touristy" things often has traditionally had negative connotations, with some people keen to make a clear distinction between themselves as sophisticated travellers as opposed to the run-of-the mill "tourists" (i.e. pretty much all other visitors, especially the ones having the most fun!). 

In an interview with Vogue, the late and much lamented designer and entrepreneur, Virgil Abloh, made the astute distinction between "tourists" and "purists" when it comes to work, "A tourist is someone who's eager to learn, who wants to see the Eiffel Tower when they come to Paris. The purist is the person who knows everything about everything." 

This brought to mind a recent visit to Paris. It was a literal day trip - we took the Eurostar in the morning and spent less than twelve hours in the city before heading back on an evening train. Although both of us had been to Paris before (one of us had lived just outside it for a year), we experienced it as shameless tourists, walking everywhere, taking in the big sites (Montmartre, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay the Eiffel Tower, the Musée Rodin), watching a great free public performance in the Jardins Tuileries, popping into patisseries, eating overpriced croissants and taking lots and lots of photos of everything - although sadly none of these classics!

I agree with Abloh that among the lovely qualities of self proclaimed tourists are an openness to the new - a  desire to learn and explore, a curiosity about the place they are visiting which translates into an intentionality about the way they visit it. Also a playfulness and joy at the experience of being somewhere else. Being a tourist may not be cool or sophisticated but it's lots of fun as well as being a great position from which to experience and learn new things.

In one way, our work together gives my clients the gift of being tourists when it comes to their work and business. They often thank me for the sense of perspective they gain from our work - the chance to step outside their role or team or organisation and  observe and experience it through a chunky DSLR - to see things differently, to frame things differently, to find new angles, to zoom in and out in a spirit of exploration and even playfulness. And, as they do this, they become aware of key issues and challenges, of previously invisible blockages and bottlenecks, of cultural norms they'd never previously spotted, of great work they'd never previously acknowledged and of new and more effective routes to tackling old challenges. 

There's a time to be a tourist and a time to be a purist at work. Over the next few weeks, whatever your holiday plans, why not become more of a tourist in your work or business? Don your metaphorical bumbag**, look at things through a different lens, ask directions and document what you discover. What might that look like. Here's a possible route:

1) Choose a set period of time (totally up to you)

2) Choose an area of your work or team or business (it can be an area you deal with all the time or one you haven't considered in a bit - anything from the way you do meetings to a particular process flow or product or service)

3) Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is coming across it for the first time and try and look at it with the fresh eyes of a new observer; in Abloh's words, be "the tourist, who's bright eyed, curiosity driven [with] a lust for learning..."

4)  Note down two or three questions a tourist  might have.  The Ideas section of the ONION workbook talks about how best to involve other people in this process.

5) Ask those questions of yourself and/ or others involved in the work (Questions like "Why do we do X or Y this way?") and review the answers

6) Keep a discovery list of things you haven't seen or noticed before

7) Once your designated time period is over and you've returned "home", review that list (ideally with others in your work or business) and think about your Next Steps

Or come up with your own process! Either way, do let me know how it goes.