Java.JAN.2019-Singles

Tania Katan just keeps popping up everywhere these days.
There she is at Giant Coffee near Burton Barr library at 8:30 a.m., getting some work done. Then
there is her bright, squinty smile on a huge poster outside Scottsdale Performing Arts Center,
announcing an upcoming stage performance on Feb. 22. And there’s her name in big letters again
on... What is that? A book cover?
“I’ve published essays and short stories in books. But this is the second, meaty undertaking,”
Katan says of her second full-length work of non-fiction, Creative Trespassing: A Totally
Unauthorized Guide to Sneaking More Imagination Into Your Life and Work, to be released by
Penguin-Random House in February.
The book developed after Katan spent the last several years serving as a tech industry hired gun,
doing a little consulting over here, motivational speaking over there, and generally creatively
disrupting countless traditional workplaces, infusing them with her infectious energy, off-the-wall
extroverted-ness, and keen eye of a quirky outsider.
“People would constantly ask, What do you do? And I remember always answering that question
with a job title.” Katan has held a number of different corporate positions. But at some point she
realized that putting on a label such as “program coordinator” or “curator” did not extend far
enough to explain who she is and everything she does for a company.
“Then I finally realized, that [title] says so little about what I actually do. In fact, I think I’m
more than my job title!” she declares. “When I started speaking as a representative of these
organizations, people began saying, yeah, but you bring so much more to the job – you bring a
sense of humor and lightness!”
“I feel like my entire life has been creative trespassing. I just didn’t have a word for it.”
Katan used her experiences in the corporate world to begin experimenting with her own inventions,
disruptions, and interventions. Many of these exercises in reclaiming space and agency at work
became direct inspiration for what she calls “productive disruptions” in the book. For example,
Katan advises readers to invent their own job titles and then print new business cards and own that
self-proclaimed title.
During her time at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, she titled herself Curator of
Shenanigans. Some in the office frowned at the silly new title, but Katan took her business cards
to conferences, handed them out, and the title stuck. Potential new clients and professional
connections remembered her and contacted her to help promote and advance SMoCA.
“If you take the initiative to do something that furthers the mission of your company or organization,
and it works, they are not going to be like, ‘Throw away those business cards! They’re too racy.’
They’re going to be like, ‘Thank you for getting us extra business’,” she explains.
The productive disruptions encourage employees to push the rules and seize agency in their places
of employment. These bold moves show the management you’ve got “moxie,” just like Tania
Katan. “As I got an awareness of what I was doing – by bringing in skills that were not on my job
description but were necessary – it actually helped. It helped generate revenue, it helped marketing
efforts, and it helped really traditional boxes get ticked.”
Katan says she has always been a writer, her entire life. She began as a kid, journaling. Developed
her own code in a handwriting that only she could read, just in case she needed to protect her
secret information. Sometimes it was stories, sometimes it was poems. She has never limited
herself to any genre.
Tania
Katan
Creatively
Disrupting
the
Workplace
By Jenna Duncan
12 JAVA
MAGAZINE