Category: covid-19

Snapback: Veneers, Women and Working from Home

Here is a dredge from last year’s draft posts (September?). Be warned, it is just a rant and a request for your thoughts.  Please see the question at the end.

I had clicked into this link 8 Tips for Being a Successful Remote Worker – The Community Roundtable.  It provoked a reaction as a woman, a mom, a parenting grandmother: the dang veneer of what working SHOULD look like for women versus our realities. Now let me be clear – the article was not telling me to put on a veneer, and in some cases the opposite – thanks Shannon. (The shoe thing cracked me up!) It did bring up how much women have to look and act a certain way in the workforce to achieve or even maintain professional credibility. How many freaking articles have you read about how to “look professional on Zoom?” 

At first we were all in our sweats and yoga pants. Then I saw more women putting on makeup and making sure their setting was “professional.” The masks were going back on. Snapback!

We need this veneer for what? Because it is important for credibility? To show we could both parent and work? What about performance?

I would have thought COVID-era WFM would have freed us from the superwoman expectations. That the reality exposed on video calls in our homes (closets, living rooms, kitchens, bedroom corners…) would have created more slack, not less.

Silly me. We should all be on equal footing right? No, over time I just saw snapback to the old ways.

When men had their kids wander in, it was somehow adorable. For us? Not so adorable. Did anyone else notice that there was more exasperation at women as their children intruded?  Or the scheduling hassles when there was no child care options?  I didn’t see many memes of moms looking cute as chaos erupted around them.

How many women have lost their jobs or have had to quit because there was no one else available or willing to care for their children? How many women have worked themselves sick trying to make “everything all right” for their families, their coworkers, their bosses. It boggles my mind. And work that is so invisible. 

COVID gives us a once-in-a-lifetime to really change things, yet we seem to recreate what came before. 

If you could change one thing, what would you change? Where would you invest your change agency? 

Hapiness Passing Thingies

—-> Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral » Blog Archive » Happiness located in Bristol – Alas

I’m dredging old blog drafts again. This is a dead link. But dang, I loved the title so much, I decided it would have to be reborn as a blog post. A blog search turned up nothing. So I’m going to adopt “happiness passing thingies” and bring it back to life.

In our pandemic context, there is so much trauma, most of which we can’t perceive beyond our own personal experience. As we start a video meeting, we don’t see each person’s undercurrents. 

On Facebook today, the marvelous human being and author Patti Digh wondered out loud about how to honor the amazing staff and volunteers at her local vaccination site.  You can’t bring presents, food or flowers — health protocols forbid. One person said she was going to dress up in green and sparkles because here appointment was on March 17, to share some silly joy. Many other suggested kind words and “eye smiles.” (Those masks!)

Then I thought back to this draft. Happiness Passing Thingies. They are everywhere. They are in words, eye-smiles, the pause to step aside for a safe six foot pass while conveying warmth and community through eye contact. 

They are in the unexpected moments of grace, of recognition, gratitude and gifts. My walking partner shared how she gave one of her amazing staff people an unexpected day off to enjoy the Spring weather we so crave here in the PNW as a recognition of his above-and-beyond work. 

MORE HAPPINESS PASSING THINGIES! And Thanks, Ed!

Virtual Peer Assistance & Mutual Support (MOIP#11)

What we don’t see beneath the patchwork on the surface…

This is 11th in a series of posts about the tidal wave of moving online in Pandemic-Covid-19. #1, #2, #3,  #4 , #5 , #6, #7, #8, #9 and #10. This post explores peer assistance and mutual support practices, building on a blog post last Spring about virtual peer assists. This is also in preparation for a KM4Dev Knowledge Café on February 18th on this topic. (Please, join us! 7:00AM PST, 16:00 CET)

We Are Connected

My colleague and friend, Helen Gilman, pointed me to a tremendous book by Robert McFarlane, “Underland: A Deep Time Journey.” Among other fascinating topics, McFarlane writes about how trees “talk to” and support each other through underground fungal networks. (See Suzanne Simard’s Ted Talk.) This reminded me that we often operate as apparent autonomous workers in our jobs — single trees — yet in fact our networks sustain and support us. We are part of a bigger whole without which we could not exist. Like looking just above the forest floor and not below, we miss the practices that generatively connect us. Unseen, but present. With this blog post I want to “observe” some of those practices we call “peer assistance.”

Here is the baseline I offer. Our greatest knowledge resource is each other. The knowledge we each carry, the perspectives and experiences around our knowledge, and our diverse contexts, gives us an immense, and decentralized resource.

Assistance: With useful peer to peer (P2P) practices, knowledge can be more accessible, freed from centralized organizational boundaries and gatekeepers. P2P practices can subvert the power of large institutions that can dominate with or perpetuate one view of the world, one knowledge perspective. P2P approaches can step around those who wish to protect, prioritize, or hoard knowledge. They can help us be aware and address racism and colonialism that has been baked into so many of our “expert-centric” practices.

Support: At a human level, P2P practices can engage each of us. They can respect the fact that we all have useful knowledge. We might feel a bit more empowered and a bit less vulnerable working at the peer-to-peer level rather than trying to show up in front of a large organization. Feel a little more human. We, and our knowledge, might be unleashed in more generative ways.

I’m interested in these P2P knowledge liberation practices, and particularly these days, doing them online. This post explores a common form of P2P, peer assists, and how we might expand the repertoire beyond them, and to include support as well as assistance.

Peer Assistance (and support!)

A fungus growing in a rotten tree near my house…

Peer assistance is NOT new. In the knowledge management (KM) world, it has been popularized by the Peer Assist format. (Doing them online is also not new, but it matters now, more than ever, with the pandemic.) I like the definition from ODI building on Purcell and Collison’s work that describes a peer assist as a “learning before doing” activity.” Learning before doing, or the process of learning before undertaking a task, activity or project.” (Learning AFTERWARDS with peers could be exemplified by an After Action Review.)

A common format for peer assists is to have the assistee – the person who needs assistance — convene a gathering with people they invite who may have useful knowledge or expertise to address the assistee’s challenge or task. “You know more than I do, please help me!”

There is an explicit recognition in peer assists that knowledge is power. Knowing “the right thing” to do is a central component. And yet, our challenges are not always about not knowing what to do, but moving beyond feeling alone and vulnerable when risking doing what we perceive we should. Knowing WHAT to do is different than doing it. Knowing HOW do do something is different than doing it. Understanding the context for doing it. Having the mindset to do it. Confidence? Enough “safety” to take the risk? This is where mutual support comes in. Recognizing that we are humans working with this knowledge.

P2P may also help us with another huge challenge we face. Bias, or more accurately, biases! An “expert-driven” view of assistance may be implicitly propagating the bias of dominant actors or cultures. It could deprioritize or even bury local and indigenous knowledge. Could P2P approaches help us a) be aware and b) step out of these traps?

KM4Dev, one of my core communities of practice, has been engaged in ongoing conversations both about decolonisation of KM, and, as always, about specific KM practices. (See these posts from Bruce Boyes and Charles Dhewa.) For example (and forgive the broad generalization) when we look at the implicit prioritization of recognized expertise, we may be practicing racism and colonialism. When we look at centralized knowledge practices — same.

In the time of COVID-19, we have focused on ONLINE practices. Online theoretically gives us more access to a wider diversity of peers and allow easy self-organization, rather than relying on a centralized source. Peer to peer methods online provide scaffolding to connect with other peers to assist in a member’s or members’ challenges and opportunities, often in a “just in time” or very contextually embedded context. I sense that they also offer a specific assumption that we all have knowledge that may be useful to others, not just the validated and/or high status “experts!” 

Below are a few starting peer assistance and mutual support options, building on a blog post last Spring about virtual peer assists. We will build off of this at our KM4Dev Knowledge Café on February 18th on this topic. (Please, join us! 7:00AM PST, 16:00 CET)

P2P Assistance and Support Online Practice Options

One approach to peer to peer assistance recognizes we each bring something of value, even if we aren’t identified (self- or by others) as an expert in a particular area. An example of a process that recognizes this distributed resource is Troika Consulting as defined in the Liberating Structures repertoire. Three people “sit” together, taking turns sharing their challenge, problem or idea, and get feedback from two peers. It is amazing that each time people report they received insights, even with perfect strangers.

As I think about Troika compared to traditional peer assists, Troika actively promotes the idea that everyone has something of value, not just the experts. It is easy to do with just three people (or 3x X). During the process, ALL THREE people can gain insights from their peers, not just one peer assistee. There is the distribution of engagement and value creation, regardless of role.

Another Liberating Structure is Discovery and Action Dialog. DAD, as we know it, builds on the idea of positive deviance – how can one person or group succeed at what the rest of us struggle with? Exploring where there are seeds of innovation and possibility through simple guided conversations through a series of prompts, and new possibilities emerge.

There are other Liberating Structures that do this sort of unleash/engage that we might not always define as peer assistance and support, as noted in my previous blog post. You can go there for specific examples. Longstanding group process traditions such as Open Space, World Cafe and the Art of Hosting also rest on this foundation of the value of our peers.

Connect the Micorriza!

Many years back when I was deeply involved in communities of practice (CoP) work, there was this persistent observation that people drew more confidence and a sense of support from their peers in their CoP than from their supervisors and direct team members. Freed from the constraints of organizational hierarchy and politics, peer support felt more genuine. To unleash ourselves, do we need our peers? I experience this as essential.

To decolonize or remove racism from our work, do we need our peers? I don’t know about you, but I can’t even imagine doing the work without my peers, both in figuring out HOW to do it (peer assistance) and the confidence to DO the work (mutual support.)

Resources

Designing and Hosting Virtual Field Trips (MOIP #10)

Moving Online in Pandemic is now #MOIP! This is 10th in a series of posts about the tidal wave of moving online in the time of Covid-19. #1, #2, #3,  #4 , #5 , #6, #7, #8 and #9.

I’ve mentioned my work with the Floodplains by Design network over the past few years. We have been doing a lot of experimenting and practicing with online meetings and events over the last 11 months. We captured a few of our practices and now I’ve drafted an article on Virtual Field Trips. And yes, I’m looking for your review to help improve it. Right now it lives on a Google doc where you can comment. You are also welcome to comment generally here. Care to help? I’ll post the intro below. And THANKS!

1. Introduction

At the Floodplains by Design (FbD) Culture and Capacity Action Group (C&C) November 2020 meeting, we recently reviewed and reflected upon our experiences and value of field trips to FbD project sites. (See figure 1.) COVID-19 has curtailed our face to face field trips, demanding a new, virtual way of meeting these needs. 

With the C&C’s focus on building and supporting a learning network, we are interested in the overall set of learning and network weaving practices that can help spread and deepen IFM. This document offers insights and useful practices for designing and implementing virtual field trips (VTS) to support Integrated Floodplain Management (IFM). It also helps us share in general the value of, and practices around field trips which are useful in our work together whether we are F2F or together online. It builds on our first document on Virtual Peer Assists.

We hope that through these occasional articles/resource documents we can make our learning more widely available across the FbD network and beyond. 

The first section of this document  reflects more generally on the purpose and value created through field trips. The second section addresses specific practices for planning and executing virtual field trips. A resources section follows for additional information.

Figure 1: Harvest from the November 2020 brainstorm on VTS

We created this first draft of useful virtual field trip practices using four guiding questions. 

  1. What general immediate and longer term value is created through field trips in our integrated floodplain management (IFM) work? This establishes a shared baseline understanding of field trips in IFM. 
  2. What specific purpose(s) and value creation do field virtual trips serve in our work right now? With whom? Clear purpose drives how we design our VFTs.
  3. What useful field trip practices have we learned for VTFs?
  4. How might we know when we are making progress on this purpose? Like any practice, we assume that as we learn, we can improve our practice.

I’m happy to post more here if that is useful… and know the doc got pretty LONG!

MOIP #9: What I’ve Learned This Spring

Working from home… in the bedroom version!

I wrote this short article for our Liberating Structures extended network of practice. I thought it might be useful here too!

The last few months have been rich with lessons for our amazing global network of LS practitioners, and all the sub-communities it holds. Here are my lessons that have been surfacing:

  1. Creative destruction RULES. DEConstruct before trying to REConstruct offline events into the online space. TRIZ is our friend!
  2. The six knotworking questions are SUPER useful at this moment in time for developing flexible, emergent plans. 
  3. Critical Uncertainties was MADE for this time!
  4. This is an oldy, but a goody: slow down to go fast. While we can dance with abandon at the novelty as we move and reframe different Liberating Structures online, we must also hold space for people to move forward together when the moment calls. This translates to fewer structures piled into an online meeting, holding generosity to extend our practiced F2F timings and keeping technical options at the min specs, vs max specs. (Purpose to Practice is helpful here!)
  5. Ask for help. Ask specifically and offer your first ideas. This way people are more likely to respond and respond generously. As our Slack community grows and grows, we want each person to find and offer value. So ask as specifically as you can. Show you have done a little thinking already…
  6. Offer help! The connections we create through these asks and offers weaves our network.

There is a LOT more… right now I’m processing what I’ve learned through three series of rather intense online events, thinking about time, space, embodiment, humane-ness and all sorts of good stuff. So more to come. But if I wait to “finish” this, I will never finish this!!

What have you been learning?