From Shed to Studio

It began as a shed, or at least that’s the classification that the backyard building project fell into when imagining a more private space for my work. This one has modern features, in the stylistic sense, though with only the comfort of a mini-split for more extreme hots and colds. It was intended as an office rather than an exercise room. My wife and I thought that someone, someday might use it as a studio. Then I chose that label for it, and I believe it fits. 

Fred’s Austin studio

Yes, it looks like an office. And while some of my more creative thinking still comes in cafes, I make things here. I looked at patterns in my work over the years—at what I’d been making—and while it wasn’t art it was design. I’d been keeping up interests that in moments seemed to meet needs, and I’d experiment. This was not too different than my doctoral dissertation, which I’d always described more as an R&D project. It was heavy on the “R” side, but what developed shaped what today is my coaching practice. 

Now I have a dedicated structure and a studio in the metaphorical sense. It is how I organize interests and let them take form. One interest is older, and getting quite a bit of attention from me these days: Meanwhile. Emergent Play, with roots going back 20 years and most actively explored around five years ago, is getting new life. An older one, called Organizing Leadership, dates back to experiments while in health care for how leaders can develop leaders—something still largely overlooked beyond leaders thinking of themselves as coaches. Lastly and newest, Adaptive Decisions focuses on the provisional nature of most decisions while facing complexity and it re-imagines how decision processes can generate coherent forward progress.

More information will be forthcoming about my studio work here on this site. Sign up to receive updates. You can ask about it at any time, here at fred@meanwhile.com