Category: communication

Fish Bowling, Solo Galaxies and Free Writing in Holland

Note: I’m working a back log of “draft posts” that have yet to see the light of day. This is one from my trip to the Netherlands in December!)

Just a quick post from the Netherlands where I’ve been working with the fabulous Marc Coenders on an evaluation project for ICCO and it’s ComPart “project.” It has been lovely to work with the Compart team of Maarten Boers, Pier Adrea Pirani and Pete Cranston (the last two from Euforic Services and old KM4Dev pals.) It was a bit like “old home week” to use an American expression. The work has been fascinating, intense and challenging. The key word that keeps coming to me is fractal. Just when we get to one moment of understanding, things tilt just a bit and a new pattern slips in shifting things again. This is great for meaning making, not so great for finishing an evaluation report! 😉 It reminds us that we are working in a complex environment and if we are to succeed, we have to work with emergence. (See Peggy Holman’s terrific book, Engaging Emergence). We expect to be able to share the evaluation early in 2011 after the team has had time to absorb the findings!

As a little “side benefit,” Maarten Boers of ICCO hosted a borrel, or gathering for the knowledge sharing/KM/social media types in the area at the end of the day, some from my dear old KM4Dev network. It had been a long and intense day of meetings, plus silly me managed to catch quite a bad cold, complete with fever, etc. So I was really pushing my physical limits.

We planned a Fish Bowl for the borrel focusing on the interplay between organiztional change and technology, springing off of the evaluation work at ICCO with their “ComPart way of working.” I was greatful to be able to mostly listen from the outside of the fish bowl and took copious notes, some of which I’ll put below.

But I have to say, there were a few funny, wonderful moments when we, most of whom were working both in a second language and from a very tired state, misheard things and we created something new (and funny) out of it.

  • What about “solo galaxies,” misheard from “solidarity.” Earlier in the day I was taking notes on the flip chart and I thought, hm, what a unique thing. Did that mean someone was really working in isolation, a “one star galaxy?”
  • We have the fish bowl method, but what comes to mind when you say “fish bowling?” Who is bowling? Are the fish the pins? My visual imagination went crazy.
  • Later during the conversation I brought up the concept of “free riding” in networks and communities and how do we distinguish this from legitimate peripheral participation. Some one wanted to know what writing had to do with it and wasn’t free writing good for getting past writer’s block?

I love this stuff.

Anyway, here are the notes — there are some terrific one-liners. I apologize for not catching who said what, nor for having a list of participants. Not such great network weaving on my part!

On December 9th a group of practitioners joined up at ICCO’s headquarters in Utrecht, the Netherlands for an informal borrel (drinks) and conversation about the interaction between organizational change and technology. We used a “Samoan circle” variation of the fishbowl process, starting with ICCO’s ComPart team (originators of a new way of working and a wiki-centric platform of tools) sitting with evaluator and learning consultant, Marc Coenders. As the other evaluator, I (Nancy White) started on the outside and took very random notes… these are far from complete or fully accurate, but reflect the things that caught my interest. And of course the notes reflect nothing I said when I stepped into the fish bowl. Heh!

  • Disruption <–> Opportunity
  • ComPart’s original motivation – learning networking, but that wasn’t actually where things went
  • Learning can bring discomfort (my question, do we make that discomfort visible and discussable?)
  • “It is good if you like a lovely, really rocky ride” Pete Cranston
  • Introducing a suite of web 2 tools is different than when we introduced email into our organizations. yet both changed our organizations.  With Compart and web2, tools are always/quickly evolving. Faster, more complex vortex of change as tools impact organizations and organizations shape tools.
  • Some teams took to the ComPart way – “just flew” – others did not (Why?)
  • Start with need or start with tool exposure and find needs? (or both?)
  • “No one is waiting for tools” and “everyone is waiting for a solution” and “if you don’t know what a wiki is and how to use it, you won’t ask for it.”
  • Finding the balance between the polarity of “demand” and “offer.”
  • The organizational level is too big and generalized to be the locus for focus. (Locus focus? Hocus pocas? Yes, I was tired.)
  • The beginning of ComPart showed possibilities more broadly. Now need to narrow.
  • What are the cost/benefits with respect to tool and process adoption?
  • People like to ask a colleague how to use a new tool.
  • Impact of new tools and processes spread beyond the actual users
    • what is the ‘ripple’ impact?
    • is this a form of ‘legitimate peripheral participation?’
    • is this a form of free riding? (Tragedy of the commons)
    • what does technological peripheral participation look like? Do for people?
    • is this related to the problem of “you do this for me” or “we do this for us”?
    • what is obligation of employer?
  • Point to ODI’s six functions of a network.
  • How do we take into account the expense/value of facilitation (budget)?
    • rhythm of pumping the “knowledge heart beat”
    • mandate (which people resist) and voluntary (which people deprioritise)
    • is “particpation” just more jargon these days?
  • To take seriously, and to seriously involve.
  • Mandatory stuff –> unconcious, power politics, fragmentation
  • Face the truth sooner when things are/aren’t working and respond versus sticking to your plan.
    • Do NGOs do this less often than businesses?
  • Go where there is interest.
  • Role of leadership – walk the talk, model collaboration. If leadership does not have comfort wading into new tools and practices, not likely organization will fully move tere.
  • Lack of clarity of what our “partners” really need or want, all the while we talk about putting them i the center.
    • In the ComPart learning history, it was noted that in the early days it was difficult to even get names of partners to contact.
    • Negotiating with internal/external boundaries is tricky
  • How do we relate internal learning networks to external related networks?
    • tap into existing communities before creating own
    • intrinsic value of both inside and outside communities, but caution of overload and overlap
  • Individuals often have their own “eccentric” routings to get to knowledge that are useful for them, but foreign to others and hard to share w/ others.
    • how they negotiate boundaries is also individual
  • What is the role here for network weaving?
  • “Empherality is ok”
  • personal and professional motivation
  • What if ICCO celebrated the learning that came from the “inssurection” of ComPart?
    • “inovation always starts bottom up” (the guy in the blue sweater)
    • sooner or later management gets involved for positive or negative reasons
    • that’s how organizations learn
  • How to recognize when we are “in over our heads” and not make wrong headed moves
  • Watch for experiments that are “too high risk”
  • “Most ICT programs fail due to lack of user participation and lack of WIFM (whats in it for me)/motivation

Reflective Teachers

When I’m designing or coaching design of learning experiences, including “classes” or workshops – any form – I like to include a reflective activity for whomever is teaching, facilitating or leading. And I like it to be visible to all the participants. This role models reflective practice in learning and removes some of the distance (power and participation) between the teacher and the participants. I believe in some way we are all on the learning path, even though our roles may vary.

In that vein, I wanted to point out Howard Rheingold’s Teacher’s learning journal | Social Media CoLab.Howard starts his reflection with goals:

My teaching goals:

I want to create the conditions for the class as a whole to make something magical happen. I want students to take away from this course all the learning outcomes I explicitly describe, but I also want to achieve much more: I want to awaken those who have been lulled to semislumber by so many years of desks arrayed in rows and “will this be on the test?” — I want to awaken them to their own powers to use online tools and their thinking skills to not only cope, but to thrive in a world that requires continuous learning. I want to grow more aware along with my students. I want to model and facilitate exploration of and reflection about the impacts of our own media practices. I want to induce student teams to outdo each other in coming up with fun, thought-provoking, incisive, profound, ways to engage with the texts and ideas. I want to inspire so much interest in social media that students read all the required texts and even some of the recommended texts.

Why I teach this way:

The subject itself has compelled me to teach about it: I have personally explored, observed, exploited, and analyzed media since internet-based communication was in its infancy, but when social media grew from a playground and laboratory for a small group of enthusiasts into a worldwide platform for commerce, politics, sociality, I became convinced that knowing how to use and think about social media could influence the final shape of the emerging infosphere. What you know and do today matters because it will be part of setting the rules for who can use these media, how they can use them, who will profit, and who will control tomorrow’s media. When I started teaching, students were starting to use Facebook — and they were already accustomed to surfing the web during class. The same media I’ve been using and which I’m now teaching are also directly challenging traditional methods of teaching and learning. Believe it or not, the ability to find out in real time whether the professor knows what he is talking about — and to silently share what you’ve discovered with the other students in a class — is a relatively new thing. When I started asking around about how teachers and students were  using social media for learning, and started asking the students themselves about what was working and what wasn’t, I began to learn that students thrive and learn from conversation among peers as well as the traditional public performance of whole-class discussion, that students’ collaborative projects amazed me and the other students with their ingenuity, that some risk-taking was exhilarating. Much of the structure of this class comes from the explicit feedback, experiment, and risk-taking of previous classes.

Given all that I’ve said so far, this description of the ideal 21st century teacher makes sense to me. I believe I fulfill some of these requirements. I strive to fulfill others. I vow to adapt, communicate, learn, envision, lead, model, collaborate, and above all, take risks. I take risks because I’ve learned that if you try something larger than your capabilities, you’ve learned something about doing something big — even if you fail. If you succeed admirably at doing something that you know you can do, you’ve learned something about doing something small. There’s nothing wrong with doing small things well. But I’m here to help those who want to go for it. This century requires thinkers who know how to take on significant challenges.

What happens, what changes when we share our intents? Does this bias participation? Seed the idea that the intent behind our actions shapes those actions? How do you as a teacher or leader show your intent?

Many Voices

I have about a half billion partially edited blog posts. But life has changed a lot for me since becoming a grandmother and now having the honor of spending afternoons with my grandbaby and I have not prioritized writing. I actually have more time for reflection on walks, while laying on the floor with the baby and such. But now work consumes the mornings, with the tyranny of the to do list.

I still take “breaks” by looking at my Twitter feed and came across this very useful article, 3 Unique ways to record, edit, and publish your audio :: 10,000 Words :: where journalism and technology meet. There are a bunch of projects where people will be doing short audios and videos and I appreciate useful posts like this one.

Then, at the bottom, there was an embedded YouTube video that struck me to the core and actually reassured me that my silence is fine. There is a lot of great stuff filling the electrons. Take a look at this.

The blog post author, Mark S. Luckie (what a GREAT name!) , wrote:

If you’re looking for inspiration for your collaborative audio projects, check out the video below of a choral piece constructed from 250 individual performances. For this unique project, each person seen in the clip submitted a video of themselves voicing a part of the composition “Lux Aurumque,” composed by Eric Whitacre. The individual videos were then edited together and the stunning result was uploaded to YouTube.

Collaboration and crowdsourcing… the future of audio is here.

In our networked world, we have many voices. We don’t all have to ‘talk’ at the same time. But look what happens when we sing “together!”

Many voices. Powerful. Thanks, Mark, for bringing this into my life today. I experienced something beautiful and was also able to let go of the “non blogging” nagging, guilt!

P.S. See also this terrific post by Mark which puts a great reframe on Personal Branding.

P.S.S. Another great collaborative song video

Questions: a thread through current work

Life has been a whirlwind of work. Keynote and workshops for the Girl Scouts of America Leadership and Development Conference,  iterative design work on a bunch of client projects, from planning to post-event evaluation, a large global e-consultation followed by a large face to face decision making meeting, and coming up this week a lovely two day graphic recording/facilitation workshop up in the mountains of Central British Columbia.

While whirlwinds are deep experiential times, they leave little for reflection (including blogging). This morning I took a few moments before ramping up to full production mode and I was skimming my blog feeds.

I love Palojono, the blog of Jono,  a designer who is a great writer and visual thinker.Jono helped me reflect, to see the thread through my current work. My practice right now is very focused on using questions. We have really spent a lot of time designing the questions that sit underneath consultations and meetings. I build questions into my talks. Thank you Jono, and here are some of your tips I’d like to share out and amplify with my network. His are related to giving a talk, but as I read them, I could easily pull them into other contexts.

via palojono: Asking great questions at talks.

Great questions…
1. Build a relationship between you and the speaker
A good question is an effective way of telling someone, yes, I get it, and what’s more this is interesting to me. It allows them to recognize you and increases the chance and ease of meeting up after a talk to discuss in more depth through the common ground created.
2. Let other’s know who you are
Asking a question in a room of strangers is an opportunity to share a little of yourself, what you’re interested in, who you are, and what you know about the subject. On many occasions, strangers have introduced themselves to me after a talk simply because I asked a question. In case you can’t tell, I think great questions are a great networking tool. (Nancy’s Note: relationships, trust, “entry doors…”)
3. Start conversations
In very many talks there is as much to be learned from the audience as the speaker. Asking a great question invites others to chime in and start a natural dialogue that is often more revealing than any prepared presentation. (Nancy’s NoteThen shut up and listen! ListenNote?)
4. Buy others time
There are many times when the bell sounds on a talk and “Any questions?” shoots round the room before I’ve barely had a chance to process the last thing that was said. A first question plays the invaluable role of giving others a little chance to think about what they want to ask once the speaker has finished. Sometimes we just need a little processing time before we’re ready to share. (Nancy’s Note: the basis of improvisation – make the other person look good!)
5. Relate the content to what you care about
Questions beget answers. Many people forget that a question of a speaker really allows you to learn an answer to your situation. When it’s a talented and experienced speaker it’s really an incredible opportunity. A great question plays the useful function of steering the talk towards what’s more relevant to you. (Nancy’s Note: from a communities of practice perspective, this hooks into the importance of finding shared domain!)
6. Force you to engage in the talk
Challenging yourself to think of great questions also forces you to think through the content of the talk and compare it to what you already know. It’s too easy to let a good talk wash over you, and a bad talk not even enter. I typically write a big question mark in the corner of my page at the start of a talk and use it as the seed for a question mindmap. Setting myself the responsibility of asking a great question means I not only have to pay attention, but I have to think critically about the talk all the way through. What a great cheap way to max out your value.