Leaves

Fall is here. The switch between sunny days and rainy grey days is constant. The weather is still lovely and windy. Then, the leaves start falling, and I can see how the trees change while walking.

As I work from home, on the go, on the train, at the office, remotely and with distributed teams, I mull over presence and performance, distributed work and continuous Learning, social dynamics and creativity.

Table of Contents

🤔 Thinking about

Community Gathering

What is the right frequency for a community of practice to gather, make sense and learn together, primarily online?

What if the host would give slots options to schedule a community chat collectively and then set the time and date to join?

What if the community has an online platform such as Slack or a Teams channel to connect, discuss and share when time permits, from anywhere and anytime, including any timezone?

Who’s checking in? Who shares updates, knowledge, experience, lessons learned, questions and reflection?

Learning From Anywhere

What is the right balance between providing resources, activities, advice, virtual peer assistance, and autonomy plus time for reflection when supporting individuals and small teams of four or five to thrive and learn?

What are the right conditions to enable people to be self-directed learners and teams?

👣 Working on

Teaching for an apprenticeship school

It requires a lot of energy, patience and optimism.

Time also implies introducing and designing courses and workshops on digital communication and marketing and entrepreneurship with activities, curating resources, coordinating and hosting learning experiences in person and remotely, and evaluating engagement and deliverables per student and team.

I do so on my own for F2F and remote workshops and courses, as well as in collaboration with a fellow learning designer and teacher for online workshops on creativity and digital strategy.

My toolkit includes using:

Moodle to share before and after each course and workshop activities and resources, questions, documents, and links to go further.

Zoom to host online gatherings per cohort and team.

A wheel of names to nudge participants to collectively share their experience or Learning of the week.

Live and asynchronous chat to provide learning support per project and team, and individual when requested.

Content and activities programming on Moodle as one can do to program posts on social media. It is one of the ways I used to be ahead and not be drowned by the flow of work.

Bunch of canvas, templates, tools, and questions to nudge apprentices and encourage them to share their inputs to create added value, and share. To name a few: business strategic analysis tools, digital strategy map, personal business model canvas, whiteboarding, agile project management tool, brand identity and essence canvas, and marketing tactics.

Creating an outline to host the learning experience online or in person.

Providing links and resources before each course or workshop to nudge the apprentices to be responsible for their learning and team projects when I am away and when they are learning and working outside the school building.

Advising with a strategy consultancy

I have joined a strategy consultancy to help our clients through agile to define their strategy and deploy it while using each other’s strengths and collective intelligence.

As a community builder, I help our clients improve their internal communication, scale community engagement and make their organizational transformation successful.

My certifications and badges from The Community Roundtable Academy in community 101, frameworks and models, and community program essentials. My skill set in distributed work, personal knowledge mastery and futures thinking. My experience with design thinking and agile. All of that cornucopia should help me thrive in that responsibility and role.

Prequel

The two partnerships in my freelancer life aren’t the fruits of something that happened overnight. Instead, I have built over months relationships and stayed persistent and patient to start seeing the benefits of collaborating and learning with new organizations, teams and their ecosystems.

“Lucky opportunities tend to be stumbled upon, not handed out.

If you’re waiting for someone to hand deliver an excellent opportunity to you, it’s unlikely to happen. But if you are exploring and moving—if you’re in the mix and engaged—then you’ll stumble upon many opportunities.

The active mind comes across a lot. Keep tilling the soil and you will occasionally unearth something wonderful.” — James Clear

“Pick yourself up because we all go through different things. Figure out as an actor what you gonna do and work on when one project is done.

Trust in yourself, and believe in the process. Own what you have to give. Walk into that room. Got the role. Here we are.

Make people around you look good. It is about respect for the ecosystem that works with you. And everything will land much better.” — Pattina Miller

🔗 Learning

Some resources and gateways I have used during Summertime and over September to keep learning and activating for work.

MOOCs on designing and hosting a learning experience

Practical approaches, advice and tools to design and host courses and workshops in person and remotely. Live and asynchronously.

ABC Learning Design by UCL

The six learning types/cards can be simplified through the 4Ds of learning brought by Jane Hart, methinks.

The Art of Regathering | Priya Parker #CMXSummit

“How has the pandemic changed our gatherings? @priyaparker

The pandemic has let us see gathering as something creative, that gives us life, that can be non-inclusive…it has given us a social x-ray.” #CMXsummit — @jancarlyle

“The pandemic has given us a social x-ray on how we used to gather and has given us an opportunity to ask what we want to bury and what we want to invent anew” — @priyaparker at the #cmxsummit – @sarahgreisdorf

Five underrated and no less important aspects of digital transformation

How can an organization propel its change?

Being non-customer-centric.

Defrag to connect markets.

Enhance the customer experience.

Make it a project with its ecosystem.

Transform the human and societal experience.

Myth busting – the hybrid workplace

“We are only at the beginning stages. We still have a chance, AND a choice, to make it through while helping organisations understand the shift we very much need to make towards becoming #DigitalFirst and adapt accordingly.”

“(…) After 20+ years of working distributedly, relying on social, digital tools to connect, learn, share and collaborate with my peers in order to get work done more effectively, I know where I stand. Do you?” — @elsua

Community sensemaking

One of the highlights of my last week in September was the monthly perpetual beta coffee club.