The Pilgrim’s Guide to the Workplace

I am on a peak-hour, return leg flight from Sydney to Melbourne following a full day of meetings with clients where I shared the findings from our latest workplace design research. The conversations were fruitful, with a particular focus on innovation – a popular topic among organisations. We discussed the ways a workplace could help unearth ideas that organisations intuitively know exist in the ranks of their employees but can be awfully hard to uncover.

This is a specific type of book, it is a guidebook; and a guidebook serves two purposes. First, it helps you get somewhere you want to go. Second, it makes you aware of historic events, art, architecture, cuisine, culture, and people of the places you go through. It is unlikely you would find construction details of a building, or the recipe for the dishes you enjoy during your travels in a guidebook. Instead, it succinctly describes how all these elements have come together and combined themselves in the experience of a place.

Not long after I returned from my pilgrimage, I was approached by a publisher requesting an article about isolation in the workplace [3]. It was in response to tragic events that transpired at the remote Bellingshausen Station in Antarctica. The incident involved a researcher allegedly stabbing a colleague for giving away the endings of the books he was reading [4]. One spoiler too many led to the unfortunate stabbing.

Even though the events in this book took place years before COVID-19 hit the world, the lessons of my pilgrimage take on new relevance and urgency in light of the global pandemic and its aftermath. Writing this book in parallel with the world encountering vast and long-lasting changes caused me to ponder the relevance of where we work.

My GPS diligently tracked the 905 km that I walked between two of Australia’s major cities and a pedometer counted each and every humble but persistent act of putting one foot in front of another a total of 1,281,772 times.

Having a rule or prescribed manner in which distance should be covered is a common feature among most pilgrimages. Rarely are these intended to improve the comfort or welfare of the pilgrim, in most cases, it’s quite the opposite. For example, a Tibetan pilgrimage requires pilgrims to perform body-length prostrations along a rocky path for 50 km – suffering is a necessary part of the journey [9]. Whereas most of us hope to be saved from pain, others hope to be saved through pain [10].

A pilgrimage needs boundaries, and I defined mine before I took my first step. Rule One was simple and straightforward, I had to be alone. I walked by myself and avoided contact with family or friends so that I could evolve my ideas without the influence of others. For safety reasons, I sent daily text messages to let people know where I was and that I was ok, but that was all I allowed myself.

The renowned German filmmaker Werner Herzog started walking from Munich to Paris in a bitterly cold northern European winter, believing that in doing so he could save his friend and film critic Lotte Eisner. I will not distort what Herzog wrote about so beautifully in his book Of Walking in Ice [22] but, for me, the most striking part of his journey remains its spontaneity. True, he had a strong motivation.

As important as it was to be prepared, I still needed to work on the reason why I needed to be prepared. I needed an idea to incubate. Choosing the right idea was critical, I didn’t want to finish the walk only to discover that my mind had figuratively walked in the wrong direction, even if my sore legs made it quite clear they had taken me to Sydney.

The question I was asked most frequently before, during and after I completed my pilgrimage was: “why?”. Sometimes I would give full Galapagos-iguana answers and at others I avoided answering altogether by suggesting “why not?”. Without a doubt, the latter was more convincing.

Along one of the most popular pilgrimages in the world, El Camino de Santiago, in Spain, walkers are greeted with “buen Camino” to wish them a good way both physically and spiritually. My version of buen Camino was an enthusiastic and quintessentially Australian “Have fun!” followed by a wave. I would then wave back with a cheerful “thanks, I will!”

I am both surprised and grateful to see that a handful of friends came to the city for a send-off. It’s dark and we make efforts to recognise each other’s silhouettes in the blackness, eventually realising that it’s too early and cold for anyone besides us to be in the square on such a crisp Sunday morning.

Before setting out on the walk, I had read books about pilgrimages and the practicalities of long-distance trekking. I got inspiration from the former and good tips from the latter. Hot tip: if your hair stands on end, you should drop on your knees and bend forward, but not lie flat on the floor, because lightning is about to strike you.

My backpack was very sturdy and if I interpreted what Ballistic Nylon Fabric meant correctly, it was bullet proof too. I carried two packs: a big one with a 70 litre capacity and a small 15 litre one which I wore in front to balance the weight of the larger pack on my back. I’d originally purchased the packs for an overseas trek that required something sturdy to endure rocky terrain and the better-not-to-know things that happen when one checks in their luggage on an international flight.

Whenever I walked into a small country town I looked for ‘award winning’ signs. These were usually written on folding boards standing outside bakeries letting passers-by know they had the best pies, vanilla slices, or scones in town. I trusted these accreditations more than the TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence stickers on shop windows.

As the towns along the way got smaller the ‘award-winning’ signs and their competition began to disappear. One small town had nothing more than a pub that doubled as a post office – a default winner for my patronage. However, the experience of this small-town pub was in sharp contrast to the scones and jam of larger towns.

Choosing to walk in cold temperatures to avoid encounters with some of the world’s most venomous snakes paid off. I only saw one of them on the entire walk and we seemed equally frightened of each other. I am sure that if snakes could scream, it would have yelled as loudly as I did.

The warnings about the idiots concerned me. ‘The idiots’ were presumably so not because of their dim intelligence, but because they were out there to cause trouble. Most concerning of all, was the way in which the people voicing these warnings looked at me. They tilted their head ever so slightly, distorted their mouth as if tasting a lemon, and squinted their eyes – I didn’t stand a chance against the idiots.

I experienced my fair share of days walking in severe, gusty wind. The weather alert on my phone warned me of peak gusts of over 90 km/h and when it did, I relied on my walking sticks to keep me upright. I also paid extra attention to potential falling branches and even entire trees – gum trees have notoriously shallow roots. Strong wind also made for noticeably longer, or shorter, walking days depending on the wind’s direction and it played a role in whether camping was hard or simply impossible.

Day 30 was a short 13 km walk from Mollymook Beach to Conjola in NSW. It was one of the shortest walks of the whole pilgrimage and I covered it in less than 3 hours. Weatherwise, I wished I had spent more time on the road on that sunny day which was pleasantly cool and completely devoid of my nemesis wind.

Flying to Sydney for work came with the promise of exciting conversations and felt as though I fitted a week’s worth of work into a single day. In contrast, my Sisyphus goes to Sydney arrival had no meetings or conferences scheduled, nor any coffee catchups to go to. There was only one thing I had to do once I arrived in Sydney and that was to get a flight back home to Melbourne.

I looked through the aeroplane window and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I recognised the route I had taken on my approach to Sydney. I grabbed my phone and took a picture of a distinctive section of the road that I had covered on day 32 of the walk, from Sanctuary Point (covered by the wing on the right) to Bomaderry (under the low-level clouds on the left) indicated with an ‘x’, Fig. 22.1.

“What’s next?” asked my friends and family after I returned. Their faces once showed confusion when I first told them about the iguanas and all of that, but now, they couldn’t wait to hear what even crazier new adventure I had in store.

The online Camino started in the beautiful Saint-Jean-Pied-De-Port, right at the foot of the French Pyrenees. This time there was not a small get-together at the starting point and that was a good thing, because I wasn’t there either. I started the walk many thousands of kilometres away.

En-route adventures and stunning landscapes along the real Camino have inspired books such as Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage [53], Hollywood movies The Way [54], and even award winning documentaries Walking the Camino [55]. As far as I know, nothing so lofty has come out of the virtual version and I think I know why.

My Camino came with extras that were not included in the Sydney pilgrimage: I got postcards. One of these was from when I arrived at Pamplona and, allegedly, I had a go at running with the bulls. A postcard, or better said a digital image of a postcard, arrived by email each time I accumulated the number of kilometres that warranted one.

It took me 66 loops in the stormwater drain trail over the same number of days to complete the 774 km of El Camino online. A significantly slower pace when compared to the 905 km in 42 days of my walk to Sydney. However, this time around I didn’t have to put my life on hold and I squeezed the pilgrimage in alongside my daily life and unescapable household chores.

What a journey it has been. Five years ago I would have had a hard time believing a commuter flight from Sydney to Melbourne would fill my mind with iguanas and send me on a pilgrimage.

The chapters that follow are about the many trails I have covered and the paths I’ve started to lay to get closer to where the signposts point. I invite you to come along.

In preparing for my walk, I mapped the route all the way from Melbourne to Sydney and planned where I would stop and when. As it turned out, factors like the wind and rain, and even my mood (who knew?) didn’t care about my well-intentioned plans.

In a nutshell, the calibrations tell us to continue to follow the signposts, the details can be found in Appendix C: Signpost calibration.

“I am changing my answer on boredom, I think you should actually go for that one. I will be processing it obsessively for some time, I assure you.” So read the message from Nora to let me know she had changed her mind. Nora didn’t walk with me to Sydney, but still experienced similar effects with the signposts. I received other messages from locals who also embarked on mini pilgrimages following signposts in their own minds.

Let’s start our pilgrimage by following one of the most significant signposts of all: the workplace should promote absurdity. Signpost 2 came out of the idea that our capability to be absurd gives us a competitive edge over logic-based algorithms in the future of work. Because of this, absurdity should be nurtured at the places where we work (Signpost 3).

“The moment you ask for two opinions on something new and interesting that you are doing, it will end up as a watered-down version.” Said Ron while calibrating Signpost 1: Exchanging ideas too early and too often hinders their diversity and potential to innovate.

I find Signpost 4 particularly intriguing. It tells us that adversities are worth keeping, even introduced, in the workplace to promote innovation. This signpost points in the opposite direction from the way in which design deals with adversity and David summarised this well: "this better version of the world has a lot to do with removing the bad, including adversity." That is why even if adversity is as good at delivering wisdom and innovation, design might be as hardwired to avoid it as the rest of us.

Following Signposts takes us through trails that expose us to unique ways of viewing work, the workplace, and ourselves. However, the process can be overwhelming. Yet, if these markers are to deliver on their promise, they would have to converge in a single destination: a better place to work, Fig. 36.1. Consequently, it is not necessary to follow them all.

I haven’t forgotten about the other four signposts that I discussed with the locals. These will not be discussed in any detail, but I do want to share just three views which came up while discussing the process of delivering a workplace (Signpost 11).

This book freezes my pursuit of Signposts in search of a better place to work, what I have referred to as ‘my iguana’. But the ideas which underpin my creature will continue to evolve beyond the pages of this book. Not only because I will keep laying paths, but also because of you.