Fifty One. / Contributor Forty: Jennifer Edwards, Better Consulting.
On Social Choreography, Linking Boredom and Creativity, and Super Practical Sandbags.
Hey, everybody.
Thank you all for the incredible responses to our fiftieth edition of Le Cinq. I’m so lucky to have had 39 friends and colleagues lend their thoughts and guidance onto this fun little newsletter, and I’m excited to start off the next 50 with my 40th contributor!
A longtime friend from the startup world, I got to know her during my time helping out startups at NEW INC, the New Museum’s startup accelerator. She’s one of the most mindfully gifted humans I know and it’s amazing how time (and COVID) can pull us apart but Le Cinq can bring us back together to work on a new project.
Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Jennifer Edwards.
Enjoy!
The founder of Better Consulting LLC, Jennifer Edwards is a multifaceted creative whose work is driven by two core questions: What impact do you wish to have? And what stands in your way? Better, is a full-service organizational development, brand strategy, and communications company that started in New York City/Philadelphia and has since relocated to San Francisco. Better works with clients from idea, through concept and planning, to implementation and launch.
Guided by a deep love of listening and learning paired with an innate ability to hold space for complexity, Jennifer is passionate about developing human systems that center equity, uplift and honor all aspects of diversity, and place process-in-action at their core. She is an alumna of New York University (Tisch), The New School (Milano), the OpEd Project, and The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership.
A fun fact: I’ve toured North America, Europe, and China as a spoken word artist, performer, and choreographer!
What are you currently working on?
I am constantly iterating. I find it challenging to talk about the strategy and process design work I do because, by its nature, it is the work behind the outward-facing tangible work / product. It is also intentionally constantly shifting and changing. So one thing I’m working on is distilling all of the buzzwords that niche groups of people understand, like ‘organizational evolution,’ ‘change management,’ or ‘human-centered design thinking,’ into more useful language. I do this for clients often, but I find it hard to do for myself. I suppose this is a work in progress - to make the invisible, more legible.
A more concrete project Better is working on is a partnership with the Dogpatch Business Association + Green Benefit District as they begin an ambitious wayfinding initiative, here, in San Francisco. This involves reconciling a diverse range of factors, which, like many neighborhoods, in many cities, include smart growth initiatives, environmental concerns, the challenges of still recovering from the 2020 shut-down, wrangling public-private partnerships, and the development of their waterfront.
I really enjoy projects like this because there is a lot of group learning that takes shape. The process of moving people from one part of a neighborhood to another is like choreographing on multiple planes with an unknown cast. It entails building a matrix of digital and physical assets and weaving visible and invisible webs such that people will find them and feel a change in their day-to-day lives, for the better.
What are you currently excited about?
I will soon be joining the advisory board of Artist As First Responder (AAFR), an organization that speaks to my heart and passions. The 501c3 and six-point philanthropic and interactive arts platform has a demonstrated history of acknowledging, engaging, and financially supporting Black, Indigenous, and artists of color, many of whom cultivate creative practices oriented for healing communities and saving lives.
The excitement stems from my decades-long commitment to diversifying the fields I have worked in, and is energized by the invaluable opportunity to take this work to the next level.
What’s a story or article that you're currently thinking about?
If it isn’t abundantly clear, I think a lot about systems as they relate to human relationships. So it’s no surprise that Sara Friedman’s reflections (the Hustle) on the future of work—and how this, in turn, will influence the future of human interactions—have captured my attention.
“An estimated 36.2m American employees will be working remotely by 2025, with 26% of US employees already fully remote as of 2022. Co-workers are no longer living in the same city, or even continent, often making in-person socialization impossible."
A companion to this article might be “Play Work Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley,” by researcher Carolyn Chen. She points to a time, not long ago when people’s relationships were largely dictated by geographic location (your town) and religion (your church). As we became more mobile (and corporatized), both were replaced by industry.
People moved for work and people built their social structures through work, even seeking the fulfillment once thought to only be found in family and spirituality through their jobs. But as more work is shifting toward remote, at-home offices, the role of well-being—like yoga, meditation, fitness, dance classes, therapy, and even church—gets delivered through electronically mediated apps.
So I am very curious about what comes next from a holistic standpoint. This speaks to my interest in the future of "social choreography" (*note, more jargon to unpack).
What’s a product you’re currently obsessed with?
Having recently relocated to San Francisco (and with the January floods fresh in my mind), I will share a super practical product: the Hydra Barrier. These replace the tried and true but heavy and hard-to-store sandbags. Bought out of shear necessity, these made all the difference. If you live on the coast or near water or a floodplain, I’d recommend checking them out.
Wild Card: What’s an item you can’t shake your mind off of?
I think a lot about inspiration and the link between ‘boredom’ and creativity. Along with building rituals of slowing down into one’s days and weeks. In 2021, when there was considerably less to do socially, I started a 30 minute Sunday morning embodied meditation gathering via Zoom and invited friends to pop-in if they wanted to. For months I showed up every Sunday at 9am and there was always someone on the other side of the screen. Friends rotated in and out, but the point was I showed up and sat and led myself and anyone who wanted to join through a practice. It kept me accountable, by way of others, to myself.
"Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”
- Rebecca Solnit
I wonder what the velocity of our lives is doing to peoples’ ability to pause, let their minds focus and wander, and create. In some ways there is so much more to react to - raw material to play with. But without the space to sit, walk, and get bored enough for inspiration to strike, I do wonder what we are missing and how we might build for getting lost, getting bored, getting inspired.
"Reputation is what people think of you. Character is what you are."
- Oxford, The King’s Man
~ C O L O P H O N ~
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