In July, my family and I visited my brother and his wife in Milford, Connecticut.
My Field Notes from the trip started elsewhere entirely.
At the Trumbull Mall, I found myself returning to a question I’d already been exploring:
What brings people together?
I’d been compiling a list: Family. Kids. Music. Entertainment. Experiences. Food and drinks. Community. Shared interests.
The mall gave me another place to observe those things in the field.
At Build-A-Bear, where my daughter was building her first bear, another idea caught my attention: the IKEA effect from behavioral science—the idea that we tend to place greater value on something when we participate in building it ourselves.
Experimental Designation
The next day, we visited the Connecticut Air & Space Center, where something else caught my attention.
I noticed EXPERIMENTAL marked on a few airplanes. I asked my brother, who works for Sikorsky, what it meant.
As he explained, the experimental designation provides an aircraft with an exemption from normal requirements for innovation purposes.
That caught my ear.
It made it into my Field Notes in Book 007:
Experimental designation: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grants experimental certificates to allow individuals and companies to test new aerospace technologies, unique designs, or amateur-built concepts.
After the Air & Space Center, we went to Two Roads Brewing for lunch, and beers at Area Two next door. Then the word appeared again. Hiding in plain sight was Experimental Brewing.
My brother told me Two Roads Brewing loves Sikorsky.
I wondered whether Experimental Brewing might somehow connect back to the experimental designation I had just seen on the airplanes.
Maybe. Maybe not.
But by then the word had traveled far enough to become a question in my Field Notes:
Experimental Fieldwork???
What would that look like?
Could I issue myself an experimental ticket—permission to operate outside the normal requirements of my own practice in the name of innovation?
I started writing possibilities underneath it.
A co-board session.
A Field Notes email to my clients.
I tried the co-board session first.
In my board sessions, I work through questions and ideas on my 8-foot whiteboard—following what catches my attention, making connections, and seeing what develops.
So I wondered: What would happen if I invited a client into that process?
Back at the Field House
Once I returned from Connecticut, I tried a co-board session with a client, Christian, from Stable Mind, an equine-based performance and mindset practice.
The first co-board session was in a horse barn, surrounded by horses. The second, also with Christian, was here at my home office, outside in 90-plus-degree heat for two hours.
They were great for our work. They were great for the ideas we generated. They were great for our relationship. And they were great for making Fieldwork visible.
Ticket punched.
Then, almost two months after that original Connecticut note, I tried another experiment from the page:
A Field Notes email to my clients.
Sending clients a Field Notes email was outside my normal routine. My clients were accustomed to seeing the work that came out of the process, the deliverables: social posts, websites, positioning, strategy, whatever we were building together.
They weren’t necessarily seeing the Fieldwork underneath it.
So I issued myself another experimental ticket.
I sent one private Field Notes email to each of my Fieldwork clients: a confidential look behind the work at what we were building, questions I was exploring, observations from the field, patterns I was noticing, emerging insights, and what might come next.
Then I waited to see what happened.
The responses were all different, but the experiment worked.
One client replied:
“Really great stuff, Eric. So glad to have you on our team.”
Another Field Notes exchange became substantial enough that the client suggested we stop trying to cover it over email and meet in person to talk it through.
The invisible Fieldwork had become visible.
Ticket punched.
And then the experiment produced another question.
If Field Notes could make the process visible to my clients, how could I make Fieldwork visible publicly without exposing confidential client Fieldwork?
Another experimental ticket emerged:
The Field Dispatch.
The thing you’re reading right now.
The first Dispatch was another experiment—questions and connections from the field, made public rather than kept inside my notebook or inside a client relationship.
I shipped it.
Ticket punched.
And now I’m back looking at the original Field Notes from Connecticut in Book 007.
I didn’t know there would eventually be an article about any of this.
I was simply conducting Fieldwork.
I noticed something.
I wrote it down.
I let it sit.
I found patterns.
Then I built something.