Every summer, my wife Marjorie and I leave for holiday with a simple agreement: I will stop turning life into teaching material.
By the first coffee, I’ve broken it.
The Airbnb listing becomes an Ansoff Matrix discussion. Breakfast service becomes Design Thinking. The supermarket queue receives a Porter’s Five Forces analysis nobody requested. A disappointing ice cream triggers Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation. A delayed train becomes effectuation theory.
Marjorie watches this unfold with the expression of someone who has accidentally married a travelling business school.
She tries to protect herself by booking increasingly remote villages in Brittany. Last year, we spent two weeks somewhere so rural that we never saw a traffic light!
Marjorie considered this progress. No traffic. Weak WiFi. No visible economy beyond one bakery, three cows, and a man selling oysters from his garage.
It made no difference.
At the ferry terminal for the Îles Glénan, I was supposed to be checking whether we were in the right queue. Instead, I photographed the boarding flow for class, then started asking a member of staff why passengers were being divided that way and whether the signage had ever been tested. Marjorie kept walking toward the boat. She knows that coming back for me only turns a minor delay into a full Design Thinking workshop.
By lunch, I’m asking a food truck owner about margins, menu placement, and why the queue bends left. By mid afternoon, I’ve stopped the car to record an idea in Things. By evening, I’ve opened X “for one minute,” discovered a founder interview, and disappeared into a podcast.
This is partly curiosity. Mostly, it is FOMO, compulsion, and the same Always On behaviour I mock in influencers.
I know I should stop. I also know I should not have a second serving of ice cream.
The ideas arrive while cooking, hiking, driving, and before I have dried myself after a shower. After all, a good SWOT cannot wait for shorts.
My son, sensibly holidaying without us, still appears in class as an unwilling case study. Nobody in my family is safe from strategic analysis.
I call all this field research. Marjorie calls it exhausting.
After years of unpaid participation, she has asked whether she receives ECTS.
Next year, she is looking for a lighthouse without electricity.