A personal note

Hi all,

I wanted to take the time to thank you for reading my newsletter. I enjoy interacting with you here, via Twitter or other channels. Many of you have been part of my journey for some time. Thank you for your continued presence. In this post I wanted to share an update with you.

I’m now fully focusing on Human-Matter and NetNigma

Reading between the lines this means that I stopped being an employee at a university. I had many funny and interesting conversations with my children about this switch:

• Who is your boss now? Answer: Me.
• Will we live on the street? Answer: No, I saved up for this step.
• Will your business become super-famous? Answer: Only God knows.
• Are you lying to people to make them like you? Answer: No!

I’m still part of the academic world thanks to teaching for the program of Learning and Organizational Change offered by Northwestern University. I’m also still a Ronin Fellow.

I co-founded Human-Matter in 2020 right when the pandemic took off. Together with Tania we are exploring ways to help people lead more human lives rooted in behavioral science and technology.

Right now we are working on helping people develop a reflective journaling habit. We made this decision after realizing that beta testers of our initial product Restory found the journaling aspect the most useful. We are building a short self-paced email course helping people kick-start a habit of reflective journaling and at the same time explaining the science behind it. Subscribe to the Human-Matter newsletter if you like to know when this is ready.

NetNigma started as a purely consulting business helping teams collaborate better with each other (of course, thanks to social network analysis). I’m now intentionally adding teaching to my offering. I made this choice after realizing how underutilized social network analysis is outside of academic circles and decided that the method needs to be more accessible. Doing the On Deck Course Creator fellowship has helped me design my course offering.

The first masterclass will be on data strategies for community management. I’ll announce it here once the offering is live. Paid subscribers to my newsletter will receive a discount to the one hour class.

I’m also collaborating with Wayland Lum from Copperbox, a US based leadership coaching company. It’s one of a few leadership coaching companies that include social network analysis in their offering. Analytic Network is another great company (based in Europe) providing leadership coaching using a science-based approach and social network analysis. I recommend both.

Paid posts

I decided to add paid posts to my newsletter. I will continue to offer free posts. Current paid posts include:

• 3 ways to develop your teams social capital
• Team Tool Review: Slack

Paid posts will go deeper into the science of communities and collaboration and include reviews of tools. Older posts will only be available to paid subscribers.

Moving countries

Part of the changes from employment to self-employment includes a move to a country with lower living costs. The choice was easy: Spain. As I’m half-Spanish moving to Spain gives me an opportunity to experience what it means to be Spanish. Since I was 5, I was always a foreigner. With this move “home” I hope to face head on my cultural identity conflict. Maybe I will not be cultural homeless anymore? Or it backfires and the kids and I will be completely confused about our cultural roots :-)

Adios and hasta luego!