Retrospective & Futurespectives

Table of Contents

One retrospective at the past six months and three futurespectives.

Through a community chat and a blog post, I had the opportunity to engage in a live session, where I reviewed the past six months in a retrospective manner and envisioned three futurespectives, allowing me to reflect on these pivotal moments and consider possibilities for the upcoming ones.

Three questions from a community of practice

In the community of practice, Perpetual Beta Coffee Club, which is focused on distributed work and workplace learning, our host Harold Jarche asked members to come prepared for our latest conversation with answers to three questions:

“What is the most important thing I have learned over the past 6 months?

What is my professional focus for the next 6 months?

If I could ask one thing from this community, it would be …”

1 Retrospective

What is the most important thing I have learned over the past six months?

Change is constant. Ain’t no normal but only post-normal or abnormal.

Individuals, teams, networks, and communities of practice change, grow differently and get paces of change. Human flourishing takes time, patience, practice and effort.

Levels of maturity regarding digital literacy, remote work, distributed work, and learnability differ in context, country, age and experience.

It is about finding and engaging with people with the same energy. Thanks to Harold for his advice.

Three Futurespectives

What is my professional focus for the next six months?

Focus

I am still playing at the intersection of:

Workplace learning – learnability, personal mastery, personal knowledge mastery.
Community management – communities of practice and learning communities. I am continuing my upskilling and experience in community building.
Futures thinking – the present and futures of work and learning.

Work in progress

Refining my blog posts and creating new ones, I use more visual thinking techniques like sketching, diagrams, and tables to enhance clarity and brevity, although it remains a challenge for me. However, I am committed to persistently practicing and improving my skills. In those ways of thinking and doing, I aim to share my work in progress within this blog.

Done

I’ve turned part of my cornucopia from this blog into a book. You can discover my Tapestry book.

Intent

I intend to creatively write part 2 of my book Tapestry. Stay tuned.

An Alternative

If I could ask one thing from this community, it would be …

How do you deal with professional challenges with the current health crisis in your part of the world and globally?

Do you have action plans for that?

Maps? Tips?

“Just finished another great monthly conversation with our community of practice, discussing a wide variety of topics, from collaborating with the enemy to intertwingularity. https://jarche.com/perpetual-beta-coffee-club” — @hjarche

“Cooperation is also a driver of creativity as it enables more and varied connections with people and with ideas. Cooperation is a fundamental behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where most of us will be working in the digital age.” — @hjarche

“Enabling employees to get closer to each other is also key, because creativity also goes hand in hand with openness to others. Forging new links between distant colleagues creates new bridges.

This is what American researchers found when they analysed the links and relationships within companies: they were able to identify that people who had the most contact with colleagues outside their direct network were able to carry out more innovative projects than others, what they call “signature ideation.” — @sysk

“Focus on groups rather than individuals.

Agile collectives, networks, communities create today as much value, if not more, than “high potential” individuals and traditionally-structured groups (hierarchies, project teams, reporting lines). How do you take them into account, and provide HR enablement & support?” — @CelineSchill