Collective Learning: why, what and how?

This is a photo that was shot by @rotanarotana in the garden of the Museum Rodin, Paris, France.

Recently, after reading a great post from Gianpiero Petriglieri offering a different view on MOOCs, here is what I tweeted:

“Education is not just about skills, concepts, knowledge as commodity. It is also about ties/citizenship.” — @rotanarotana

So if education is also about relationships and citizenship, how do we harness new learning curves?

How do we go with learning flows?

Learning flows are already everywhere. People didn’t wait for online courses to learn from each other and on their own.

“We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility.

Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.

Instead of worrying about how to distribute scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to start grappling with in the era of socialstructed learning is how to attract people to dip into the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do this equitably, in order to create more opportunities for a better life for more people. ”

— Marina Gorbis

If you want to go deeper, you might be interested in diving into the Institute For The Future research: “From Educational Institutions to Learning Flow”.

Collective Sensemaking

I think that Marcia Conner describes how collective sense-making and learning are shifting.

“How do you define social learning?

I define social learning as participating with others to make sense of new ideas. Augmented by a new slew of social tools, people can gather information and gain new context from people across the globe and around the clock as easily as they could from those they work beside.

Social learning is not just the technology of social media, although it makes use of it. It is not merely the ability to express yourself in a group of opt-in friends.

Social learning combines social media tools with a shift in the corporate culture, a shift that encourages ongoing knowledge transfer and connects people in ways that make learning a joy.

– Excerpt from “Where Social Learning Thrives” (Marcia Conner with Steve LeBlanc).

In defining social learning, and what it isn’t, Marcia Conner also shares her learning experience and insights:

“Learning can easily occur anytime, anywhere, and in a variety of formats. It always has, but augmented by social tools, now it’s easy for others to see and learn from too.

Together we are better. Together we participate with others and learn non stop.

Every day I connect and learn from people across the world through social technologies. Some of these people I’ve met in person, increasingly they are people I didn’t know before social media.

From them I glean new insights about topics I set out to learn as well as get introduced to new topics and related information I didn’t realize would help round out what’s important to my life and in my work.”

Dennis Callahan also described in a terrific post how social learning is like gravity:

“Learning with and from others fosters an environment that creates the birth of new ideas, connections, products, etc.

Think about a positive brainstorming session that you had with someone or a group of people. This creates an energy that propels you into creating something new.”


The Big Shift is a Learning Shift

Since 2009, John Hagel has been talking about the big shift as a “movement from the world of push to a world of pull”. We are moving from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows. Learning is changing because ways of learning are evolving in our connected world; as J.P. Rangaswami wrote in this piece:

The ability to observe. The ability to imitate. The ability to try it out for yourself. The ability to get quick feedback. Four critical requirements for learning.

We’re in the midst of a digital revolution. Everything that happens can be observed by more people than has ever been possible before. The internet is a copy machine, the ability to share and to imitate has never been cheaper.

Tools continue to be invented to make it possible for all of us to be able to try more things for ourselves than we could ever do before.

This digital revolution is a learning revolution. As long as we don’t waste it. Waste happens when we constrain the ability to observe, to imitate, to try out, to get feedback.

Particularly when we have the opportunity to make it all affordable, ubiquitous.

Education drives the solution to so many of our perceived problems. Education is so incredibly accelerated, assisted, augmented by digital infrastructure. If we let it.

We who are here on earth today can make a difference to that earth by ensuring that we don’t waste this incredible opportunity, of using digital infrastructure to enfranchise everyone, to provide the opportunity for all to learn.”


How do you keep learning in networks?

To contribute to collective intelligence, you need to learn how you grow and learn? So then, how do you cultivate your curiosity and self-directed learning? As Jon Husband wrote:

There just isn’t any choice other than continuous learning because ongoing change—permanent whitewater—is our only remaining constant.”

So how do you learn faster, better from each other, and on your own? Are you curating smart networks? Gideon Rosenblatt said: 

The way we curate our connections shapes our networks in ways that affect their health and effectiveness.

I think Mark Oehlert nailed it when he said:

“Go with the flow…feel the Force…be the ball….focus on building your network. You don’t have a 1:1 relationship with social media — what you should be building is a many to many relationship.

Social media is a network, and you need to respond to the output of that network with your own network. I’ve got a strong network that kinda looks like a patchwork quilt.

It’s my responsibility to architect the right network. The cool thing? Me and my network are also part of other people’s networks — at absolutely zero incremental cost to any of us.

Start thinking like a Subject-Matter Network.

Across many industries, many people think and learn in networks. They are networked learners. For instance, many healthcare professionals are networked learners. It becomes a reality.

“I speak to doctors, and they tell me to just what extent they are learning from international peers through social media”. – Daniel Ghinn


Are you both mindful & networked?

But among the most challenging difficulties for learning from each other in our hyper-connected society is the ability to be mindful and connected to ourselves. Disconnect to connect,” said Tiffany Shlain and Whitney Johnson. If you have time, I also recommend watching her fun, short and insightful videos.

So being mindful, connected to ourselves, thinking critically, and learning in networks, imply using our five senses in smart and modern ways. Why does it matter? It matters for each of us to be networked and for tribal knowledge because, in a fragmented world, we need to go deep; as Nilofer Merchant said:

“It’s a fragmented world. And it’s only becoming more so. It used to be that when people wrote, they wrote more deeply. In the early days of the web (pre-twitter), I remember hand picking the few voices I would listen to and then putting them into my RSS feeder and checking for their essays.

Essays, not tweets, were the way we shared what we were thinking. But as “content” has become more important to maintain a standing online, more and more people are entering into the fray. More and more people who may not even have a point of view to advocate but just want to participate in the conversation. ”

— Nilofer Merchant

So how do you go fast and slow for navigating the knowledge flows?

Towards network thinking & libraries

As William Gibson said: “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” So are we heading to a world of connected learning, network thinking, and networked libraries? These words from Greg Satell paint the age in which we live.

“I am also meeting and collaborating with people online that I would have never had a chance to know before. I can even gain access to knowledge in other languages through online translation.

In other words, I am to stumble over people and knowledge to a degree that wouldn’t have been possible even a relatively short time ago.

And that’s why we can expect life to continue to get better. While earlier technologies allowed us to master energy and matter, newer advances are giving us something far more valuable: They are unleashing the power of human potential.”

Collective Learning & Future Skills

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I reflect on the value of defragmenting and unifying our artefacts, our writings and ourselves in a fragmented world. Read on more in this post.

Defragmenting our Arfefacts

For past Winter holidays, I grabbed the Greenlights Journal by Matthew McConaughey. As he introduces:

“Greenlights: Your Journal, Your Journey is a guided companion to the memoir Greenlights, filled with prompts, pithy quotes, adages, outlaw wisdom, and advice on how to live with greater satisfaction.”

Sometimes it is not so easy to map our thoughts when we face the challenges of fragmented writing.

With personal knowledge mastery’s activities and tools I use, I don’t just write on one platform, but on many ones. From Slack to IM messaging tools. From my blog to a book. From Google Workspace to M365 documents and Clickup documents. Less and less on email. #NoEmail

Lately I have also been sharing a few thoughts on Mastodon and LinkedIn, one conversation at a time.

My crumbling of writings through blogging, microblogging, asynchronous and live chat is fragmented. I wonder.

How can I unify and streamline these streams of writing into one river of writing?

Grant Snider’s comic strip is full of stellar insights. Enjoy it.

“To sketch what you observe is to change the tempo of your observation. It necessarily slows your sensemaking down, and sharpens what you see.” – Fiona Tribe

Rewind: The Learning Journey sketchnoted by Klara Loots and moi.

“Slowing down is important for deep observation and learning.” – Dibyendu De

Defragmenting our Writings

The other thing I notice is that my writing time is still an unplanned activity.

I don’t do it consistently. I’m aware of it.

“I thought of myself as like the jazz musician: someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful.

I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures.” – Toni Morrison

How do things work for me?

If I notice something, I might think about it. Do some research or not at all.

Then I would make a draft and sleep on it for a while. When I come back to it, I will refine the post before sharing it with my network on social or in person and through the online communities I engage with.

But it all starts with why I am writing.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment & in retrospect.” – Anais Nin

We write to reflect and to practice.

I have a blogroll to engage with and read deep thoughts, shared experience, reflection and musings from bloggers around the world.

Being aware of ourselves. Noticing ourselves and trying to unify ourselves could begin by blogging on our own blog. But the challenge is to unify or defragment ourselves in a fragmented world. As I noticed in this old post:

In a fragmented world, we need to go deep; as Nilofer Merchant said:

“It’s a fragmented world. And it’s only becoming more so. It used to be that when people wrote, they wrote more deeply. In the early days of the web (pre-twitter), I remember hand picking the few voices I would listen to and then putting them into my RSS feeder and checking for their essays.

Essays, not tweets, were the way we shared what we were thinking. But as “content” has become more important to maintain a standing online, more and more people are entering into the fray. More and more people who may not even have a point of view to advocate but just want to participate in the conversation. ” —  Nilofer Merchant

How can we go deep and defragment ourselves in a fragmented world?

Defragmenting Ourselves

Like this post you are reading, I wrote a first draft a while ago. Then I slept on it until I got my blogging mojo back. Because I read a good recent post by Meredith:

“That put me in mind of this quote that I found somewhere on my internet travels:

“Each person is to build his or her soul by bringing the widely scattered elements of experience into a unified whole.” – Ilia Delio

How do we unify those widely scattered elements of experience? We all have our own way of coming at that challenge, and, for me, I always turn to creativity and the arts” – Meredith Lewis

I carry on the conversation on Mastadon with Meredith on the topic of unifying/defragmenting ourselves.

@dangerousmeredith A fine piece, Meredith. You made me think. My pen pal, Daniel Durrant wrote in a conversation in 2015 this:

“A network of fragile fragmented selves gains from disorder and evolves as we become aware of their failures.”

Your latest and his thoughts made me mull over.

How can we defragment our fragmented selves in a fragmented world?

As Daniel wasn’t on Mastodon for this conversation, we’ll continue it with Meredith on Twitter. Especially as I revisited this oldie “A Networked Community of Fragmented ‘Selves” by Dibyendu De, which is fully of nudges to ponder:

“What happens if the ‘selves’ weren’t aware of each other?

What happens if the selves simply knew each other well enough to form a community of strongly networked selves that help each other grow?

What happens if a person tries to create or design synergy between different selves?

How does one become a better spectator and player in the networked community of human society that constantly interacts with nature – both within and without?

March is a very special month for me. Every year a cascade of deep thoughts, events and movements happen at the same time. As I have blogged:

March. Is it the month when I am in motion, exploring, activating, rewinding my journey, updating my toolkit, staying curious, colliding, asking myself why, innovating, developing new capabilities and mindset, and embracing the unknown.

Keep it real.

Happy Spring.

Did you enjoy this post? Check out The Tapestry Book.

Did you have a pleasant summer? Do you enjoy Fall ?

Please find below my eight seasonal gems: book readings, exhibitions and cities. Enjoy.

Gem 1: Le Continent Blanc x Matthieu Tordeur

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I read the paper book version since the early days of Summertime. What a great real story from an explorer to disconnect and wander while travelling or not.

Gems 2: Le Havre & Exhibits

Le Havre in September 2019

Source: By Martin Falbisoner – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82036024

I previously visited Le Havre and fell in love with this Normandy seaside town once again this summer. Take a look at this Les Ambassadeurs’ city exploration. I’m particularly fond of the architectural style and flair by French architect Auguste Perret, who has left his imprint not just on Le Havre, but also on Paris and Amiens. It exudes charm, refreshment, modernity, class and boasts impressive architecture.

The present displays, ‘Un été au Havre‘ in certain artistic locations both inside and outside the buildings, are splendid and captivating regardless of whether it is sunny or rainy.

Were you aware of this?

“Paris, Rouen, Le Havre, une seule et même ville dont la Seine est la grande rue.” – Napoléon Bonaparte, premier Consul. Le Havre, le 8 novembre 1802.

Translated:

“Paris, Rouen, Le Havre, a single city with the river la Seine as its main street.” – Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul. Le Havre, 8 November 1802.

Gems 3: Dublin, Howth, Malahide

In the ‘Amateur Traveler’ podcast, Chris Christensen and his guest discuss about travelling to Dublin, Ireland.

According to them, Dublin acts as the gateway to the rest of Ireland and is renowned for its welcoming atmosphere.It is also a compact city which allows tourists to easily visit all the prominent and lesser-known sites in just three days.

This is what I experienced during the transition from Summer to Autumn in three cities. The highlights of my trip included listening to traditional Irish music at O’Donoghue’s in Dublin, wandering through the medieval castle and gardens of Malahide, which is a fortress spread over 105 hectares of parkland, adorned with antiques, paintings and a fairy trail, and exploring Howth. See below a photo of the stunning landscape I photographed while hiking on a sunny and gusty morning.

learner experience propelling expérience apprenante propulser sea ireland howth

Gems 4: Exhibit Busan, the world at your fingertips, the Korean Cultural Center, Paris

I continue to develop my curiosity for Asia through my intrigue with Busan, the Korean city, and and its culture, which I explored through an exhibit I attended in Paris.

“The exhibition you’re going to see will help you explore various aspects of this southern city, which is less known than the influential Seoul, but just as appealing and vibrant. Discover the locals who, despite the twists in history, have managed to keep their bubbling optimism alive. The Korean Cultural Centre invites you to ride the wave and delve into a culture that has been greatly influenced by foreign elements.

Divided into two main sections, this exhibition gives a broad overview of what has made and represents Busan. Firstly, a first section presents its history and identity. Then, a second chapter takes over by revealing an exciting cultural part.”


Gem 5: Tous pédagogues ! Former, enseigner, transmettre (Enseignement supérieur) x Didask

My year of designing learner experiences and teaching has been engaging, rewarding and insightful. During this year, I have delved into this book to refine my teaching techniques and pedagogical skills, given that I am now in my second year of teaching.

Gems 6: Nantes & Third place

hangar a bananes 4

Source: https://www.iledenantes.com/operations/hangar-a-bananes/

I am fascinated by the futures of workplace and third places that supercharge work and collective learning. During this summer, I had the pleasure of discovering and relishing such a third place in Nantes, France.

“The Hangar à bananes, an old port wasteland located on the western tip of the Isle of Nantes, has become one of the most iconic entertainment venues in Nantes since 2007. Over the years, bars, restaurants, a nightclub, an art gallery (the Hab Galerie), and a theatre have been established there.”

Gem 7: Exhibit Le Paris de Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923), Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris

I thoroughly enjoy the architectural exhibition that showcases the works of Gustave Eiffel. The exhibition is brimming with intricate details and highlights his remarkable accomplishments, which have left an enduring legacy in France.

“To mark the centenary of the death of the “iron magician”, the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine is unveiling another facet of the genius’s career.

He is known the world over for his famous 300-metre-high “Iron Lady”. But who knows about his department stores, his synagogue, his church or his secondary school? The Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, located in the Palais de Chaillot, is revealing a completely different facet of the illustrious architect’s career with its exhibition The Paris of Gustave Eiffel. To mark the centenary of the death of Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923), the builder’s sometimes overlooked achievements in Paris are presented. Behind six of them, only the most initiated know the imprint of the genius.” – translated from the article from Le Figaro

Gem 8: À l’aube de nouveaux horizons x Nathalie A. Cabrol

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I listened to a fascinating fifth episode of “Who We Are” on the “À voix nue” podcast by France Inter, featuring the author of the book. This episode piqued my interest and curiosity. I have added the book to my reading list.

Your turn. What are your favourite seasonal gems?

Did you enjoy this post? Check out the Tapestry Book.

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.

Like leaves that morph in different shades of colours, which personal growth evolutions have you noticed from Summertime to Fall?

It makes me think of teaching at a French apprenticeship school.

Step by step

Teaching requires a lot of energy, patience and optimism.

Subjects covered will include creativity and innovation, digital project management, communication and marketing, entrepreneurship, IT and digital literacy.

Each session per course or workshop includes a deep dive, an individual or team activity, templates to use, a deliverable to produce, a space to drop the deliverable for evaluation, and resources to go further. The content is integrated and shared in a dedicated Moodle space per class, one session at a time. The activities are done in-person or remotely, live or asynchronously.

For each course or workshop, I go through the same process.

Step 1: Scoping

The aim is to identify the specific profile for the learner experience. To do this, I answer the questions below related to the specific theme I will cover.

Question Response What’s in it for my learner experience?
Who is the person ?

What is his/her profile?

What does he/she knows in the subject?
Any bias?

Any wrong habits?

What is he/she doing today that needs changing?

What’s in it for the learner?
How is the learner experience likely to be welcomed?


Step 2: Designing & integrating

This step is the one I enjoy the most.

I ask myself the following questions:

  • What changes do I expect?
  • What does a beginner do?
  • What does a skilled person do?
  • What do people find difficult?
  • What steps, situations or themes should learners have in mind and in practice?

To do this, I specify the learning moment, the suggested activity and the time spent for each learner’s goal.

My pedagogical sequence should contain more exercises than passive transmission. The activities must be spread out over time, and must include sufficient breaks. I start by setting aside these breaks.

I don’t forget to give reminders and alternate subjects.

A teaching sequence looks like this table and can have several teaching methods.

Learner Moment

 

Face-to-face learning approaches

 

Remote learning approaches

 

Self-assessement Coaching session Quizz
Deconstruction Immersive session Quizz
Content delivery Course, book, practical guide Webinar, how-to, wiki
Practice Role play, Learning by doing through innovative project co-design & development Learning by doing though innovative project co-design & development
Reflection Mentoring, knowledge sharing & co-creating workshop, book club Forum, chat
Automation Flashcard, Q&A in duo or trio, game cards, icebreakers Icebreakers
Evaluation Peer evaluation, exam Quizz

It involves curating and connecting the dots between the knowledge I pull. From my blog, archives, environmental scanning, experiences, use cases, conversations and knowledge sharing from my network and the communities I engage. It takes time and involves sensemaking, content management and clarity. At the same time, use personalized templates from decks to sheets and documents.

Here is how I go each time: I create the outline, frame questions, share deep dives on basic skills, approaches or tools, roadmaps for an individual or collective activity to practice and reflect on, and resources to curate to go further.

Designing in-person live and asynchronous learner experiences is an individual craft. This work can also be done in collaboration.

Rotana, a quality person, I particularly appreciate his calmness and, at the same time, his liveliness of mind. We built modules for apprentices BUT TC in the second year of their specialization.

The exchanges were fluid and fruitful, and we were able to build on each other’s skills.

He brings a lot of advice and tools that he proposes to his clients, and that favours the methodology.

A rich and relevant relationship: we were meant to work together.” — Christine, Digital Learning Manager / Learning Designer

Once the outline and content are ready, I integrate them into a Moodle space so each class can explore it one session at a time.

Step 3: Coordinating

I am planning live and asynchronous sessions – remotely and in-person over months on the school’s learning portal, Clickup and my calendar. That way, I can anticipate which session is upcoming and has been hosted. Which time estimated and time done are per session to scope, design, host and review each session.

I often block slots on my calendar to dedicate time and energy to each step of managing pedagogical projects.

Step 4: Onboarding

Each course or workshop comprehends four to six sessions of three hours spread over several months. To get an overview, I send an onboarding message to the class. In that way, they can save the dates in the calendar and know the intent, the skills to develop, the theme per session, the on-demand support, and the next step for the first session.

Step 5: Hosting

For each session, three possibilities

Possibility 1: Live session in-person

Hosting gatherings per cohort and team takes patience, refinement and practice. When it is in a physical classroom, I often start with the traditional setting of the space with tables and chairs in rows, especially when I introduce the session, take deep dive into an essential skill, approach or tools, show and explain, share instructions and tips to produce the expected deliverables.

Sometimes I use a wheel of names to nudge participants to share their experiences or Learning of the week collectively.

When it is time to gather and collaborate to co-create a deliverable per team, I invite the cohort to stand up and move the chairs and tables to bundle two tables with chairs around them to create a pod. In that way, they are in a better mindset and conditions to communicate, reflect and collaborate. In addition, I often leave an empty chair on a pod to come, observe, jump into the conversation, share feedback and leave anytime during the session.

The roadmap per expected deliverable with the deadline and resources to use to produce it is always visible on the physical whiteboarding of the classroom. I project one of my slides with the instructions on it.

Possibility 2:  Live session hosted remotely via Zoom

There are always five moments. The welcoming, the icebreaker, the collective moment in the same room, the activities and virtual peer assistance in breakout rooms, and the regrouping for a debrief and wrap-up.

How to foster conversation with remote learning and distributed work?

“If there are 120 people in the room and you set the breakout number to be 40, the group will instantly be distributed into 40 groups of 3.

They can have a conversation with one another about the topic at hand. Not wasted small talk, but detailed, guided, focused interaction based on the prompt you just gave them.

8 minutes later, the organizer can press a button and summon everyone back together.

Get feedback via chat (again, something that’s impossible in a real-life meeting). Talk for six more minutes. Press another button and send them out for another conversation.

This is thrilling. It puts people on the spot, but in a way that they’re comfortable with.

If you’re a teacher and you want to actually have conversations in sync, then this is the most effective way to do that. Teach a concept. Have a breakout conversation. Have the breakouts bring back insights or thoughtful questions. Repeat.

A colleague tried this technique at his community center meeting on Sunday and it was a transformative moment for the 40 people who participated.” Seth Godin


Possibility 3: Asynchronous session guided remotely

The session is asynchronous. I use email, Google Chat, Google Meet, and Moodle to communicate and bring virtual assistance on demand. The apprentices are autonomous and often in teams to get the work done.

On the D-Day of each session, I provide a roadmap, templates and resources to go further via a programmed email. In that way, I am ahead and not drowned by the workflow.

The templates and resources to go further are canvases, tools, and questions to nudge apprentices and encourage them to share their inputs to create added value and share. 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.

Step 6: Supporting

I teach to share knowledge, questions, experience, and use cases and highlight the reflections, insights, deliverables and results brought by apprentices. I am also here to support, coach and level up each person regarding their strengths, skill set, IT and digital literacy, drive and leadership.

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

Next steps: Evaluating, Debriefing, Improving

The following steps are evaluating, debriefing and improving a learning experience. Stay tuned for deep thoughts. In the meantime, here are actionable insights from my network:

“Teacher is a hierarchical title to approach learning with students. Go beyond that with coaching and not being above the students but at the same level as them. You learn among and with them.

Create the environment so that they learn and reflect, you encourage them to learn on their own, together by doing.” — Paul Simbeck-Hampson

I try to embrace what Harold Jarche shares in his post on modelling as the best way to teach:

“(…) With a standardized curriculum and constant testing, there is never enough time for most school students to fully learn. There is too much information and much of it is without context. But mastery often comes from modelling. It is how the apprentice becomes a journeyman and in time a master. It is not done in isolation.

The core method (of six main components) for the teacher/master in cognitive apprenticeship is modelling. This can be aided by external coaching and scaffolding, but it is up to the learner to spend time on articulation, reflection, and exploration. Developing mastery requires deliberate practice over time.

Testimonials

“The whole of Team Perso* (brought by Clara, Amin, Jordy & Andy). would like to express our satisfaction with the project we carried out alongside Mr Ty. Your guidance and the skills you passed on to us played a crucial role in our collective success. The chemistry between us has been remarkable, with each member adding their share of quality, which has greatly contributed to our collective success.

This message helps to celebrate our shared achievement and to identify areas for improvement for our future projects.

Thank you for your support and contribution to our professional development.” 

*Perso, the inclusive BeautyTech project, make-up for everyone

“You hosted Digital Marketing workshops at CFA Descartes, which enabled me to develop a strong passion for the field of digital marketing.  Your teaching style and guidance throughout our projects and deliverables truly made the difference.”

“The Sneak’Renov project, carried out as part of the workshop dedicated to business startup co-design, was a very rewarding experience for me. Despite certain difficulties encountered with my team, we were able to demonstrate great perseverance and remarkable discipline.

Team spirit, often considered a stumbling block, was an innate notion for us throughout the project. Everyone’s ideas and experience enabled us to be effective at every stage.

What’s more, the experience enabled me to develop new skills and reinforce those already acquired. Finally, Sneak’Renov proved to me that the collective aspect is stronger than the individual.” 

“Being able to create a project from scratch as part of the workshop dedicated to business startup approaches like this has been an instructive experience. It teaches us to stand on our own two feet, collaborate and build a common project. For me, the group work was a great success, with everyone pitching in and working seriously. This enabled us to work quickly and productively. Finally, I’m proud of my team.

It’s not always easy to work with several people, and it’s even harder to stay motivated on a project like this.”

“Co-creating the Sneak’Renov project as part of the business startup workshop was an enriching personal experience for me.

I learned about business creation and developed my leadership, planning and teamwork skills. This experience has given me confidence as an entrepreneur and helped me grow personally and professionally.” 

“This workshop, dedicated to the process of setting up a business, was very well supervised and gave me a good grasp of the business creation process. What’s more, handing in deliverables enabled my team and me to make faster progress despite the workload involved. Mr TY guided us well in terms of task organization and was always looking for us to outdo ourselves.”

“This workshop, dedicated to the steps involved in setting up a business, was very enriching and enabled me to get a real idea of the stages involved in carrying out my project. There are often stages that are overlooked, but which are essential if the project is to succeed.

We were really supervised for this project by Mr TY, which was beneficial because we felt the daily support of the workshop host and had a complete framework for our work.

The expectations were clearly stated, and with each intermediate deliverable we had feedback on the work done, which enabled us to improve and deepen the work for the final rendering.” 

“We would like to express our deepest thanks to our workshop host Mr Rotana Ty for his help and involvement in this entrepreneurial project.” 

“I enjoyed the work; we were able to divide up the work well. Thanks to this project within the workshop on entrepreneurship I was able to use the skills I had seen in place to apply them in class and learn new skills. I developed my document writing skills as well as my presentation skills thanks to the various appearances in front of the class during the face-to-face sessions.” 

“This workshop on the theme of the marketing mix was very stimulating and instructive. The fact that we were able to develop our project over the year enabled us to immerse ourselves in the startup spirit. Indeed, we imagined a concept in small groups and developed it over the course of the sessions: from competitive analysis to marketing and communication plans and costs, we were able to practice all aspects of the marketing mix and discover new digital tools.

Despite the difficulties we encountered, we were able to organize ourselves and to build on each other’s strengths to bring the project to a successful finale. ” 

“Carrying out this project during this workshop on the theme of the marketing mix was both very rewarding and very interesting to accomplish. I particularly enjoyed having to apply what we’d learned in class to our personal project.

However, thinking about how to design an application in its entirety is not an easy task. Nevertheless, our group managed to meet the workshop’s expectations. I’m very proud of the work our group accomplished.” 

“This workshop on the theme of the marketing mix enabled me to develop new skills. We were able to clarify our ideas according to our passions and interests. I liked the project because it highlighted our creativity as well as our priorities.” 

“This workshop on the theme of marketing mix gave me confidence in my choices, more organization and a certain satisfaction with the product chosen and produced.” 

“I learned how to analyze a market for a product and build a detailed study using the different methods proposed.

The project carried out during the marketing mix workshop was very interesting and rewarding. In fact, as the sessions progressed, we were able to learn a little more about how to carry out a project properly, and what needed to be done/achieved in order to be able to create it in the best possible way.” 

“We were able to consider all the steps involved in designing and promoting a product/service, which isn’t exactly easy because there are so many stages and so many things to think about.

We learned a lot from this project, which we carried out during the marketing mix workshop. It even made all seven of us project ourselves into the future.

What’s more, our host was with us from the start to the end of our project.” 

“This multidisciplinary workshop was a different experience for me from other workshops, with a very thorough follow-up by the host, who made himself available. I was able to understand all the steps to follow and the development of the project. The expectations were concrete and useful.” 

“Our experience on the project during the multidisciplinary workshop waś extremely positive and waś a valuable source of learning for our team.” 

“I found this work during the multidisciplinary workshop very interesting, there are several steps that I often find in my daily business life. It helped me visualize certain points more clearly and improve them.” 

“This multidisciplinary workshop was very different from the others, in that we had to draw on our coursework to come up with ideas, but also on our general culture. Our project also involved the aspect of civic awareness, and I also enjoyed working with new and enriching people.” 

“This multidisciplinary workshop was more than enriching; I was able to develop many skills that I think I’ll use every day for my future projects. I learned a lot about project management and environmental issues. I was able to put my finger on things that seemed abstract to me, and that enabled me to assimilate them.” 

“It was an extremely rewarding learning experience. I learned how to set deadlines, break tasks down into achievable steps and set priorities to reach our objectives. I was also able to develop my skills in researching and gathering official information. Gain valuable experience in using analysis and planning tools.

Although there were challenges, the positive results were achieved, and the lessons learned were invaluable.” 

An enriching experience that confirmed the importance of working together. This multidisciplinary workshop required a great deal of effort and a great deal of thought in terms of our work and the coherence of what we said.” 

“Through this multidisciplinary workshop, I developed a huge number of skills, in particular: autonomy, creativity and responsibility. The theme was extremely enriching and captivating, and I developed new skills in particular: REX, Clickup, SMART Objectives, and so on…”

“We would like to thank Mr Rotana Ty for his commitment and availability during this multidisciplinary workshop.” 

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

Pluarity of seasons.

Summertime is almost over. Fall is around the corner. I can’t wait to see the best of all Autumn.

leaves london learning engagement pluralité plurality autumn automne fall

A photo I took while walking through the London woods.

“We are plurality.

Our individuality is a temporary manifestation of relationships.

Relationships with the multitudes.”

Ecosystems are built on the conversations between interdependent partnerships.

When we cut these conversations the ecosystems fall apart.


Without the network the single disappears.

The center, the fundamental, isn’t the single, the “self”, rather the network.” @FBanishoeib

Plurality of Actionable Insights

Digital Sobriety

This excellent article by Livio Hughes, As our world burns, is it time for digital sobriety shared by Cat Barnard got me thinking and triggered the intent to include some habits and tips to reduce my carbon footprint. Even to tweet and write fewer posts.

“At the individual level, and in our private lives, there are many small actions we can take which, repeated at scale, can create powerful network effects. See for example some of the tips for reducing your digital carbon footprint hereherehere, and here.

Good luck to us all!”


Learner Experience Design

As I currently explore an opportunity to design a learning experience with one of my clients, I’ve been thinking about what needs to be included when creating effective and engaging learning experiences. The article Professional Learning: Path to Agency and Impact’ by Melissa Elmer brings some insights and actions to take.

“My last post focused on the future of learning. I emphasized the necessity of community, content, and events becoming interdependent. All of that is true, and the designers of learning experiences should definitely design experiences with those interdependencies at the base of the design.”

(…) “Instead of creating slides aimed to deliver information spend time figuring out what questions need to be asked.

Instead of making a list of activities or a list of boxes to be checked, schedule some time for conversations around the questions.

Here’s the bottom line. If the learners check out, the organization loses and the people don’t notice or care. If the learners check-in, everyone wins. Organizations that figure out how to invite the learners to the learning and create the conditions for the people to have agency in the learning process have a better chance of having an impact on learning.

What will you do to create the conditions for learning?


Leadership

Dear social ties in my network from the UK and the countries of the Commonwealth, my deep condolences. R.I.P. Queen Elizabeth II. Sending warm thoughts.

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.” ― Queen Elizabeth II, Christmas Broadcast in 1991 via @write2tg

 

“Queen Elizabeth is an amazing leader. She has a clear purpose to provide stability, validation, coherence, and a cultural touchstone for the UK and she has done so in service to the country. She is a great example of how leaders can quietly and modestly be strong.” @rhappe

Plurality of Nudges

Glorious Pasts

“What do you think glorious pasts mean for organisations?” asks David Ross.

My two cents: successes and failures, and learnings from them. Retrospectives or looking back to look forward. Community legacy, artefacts and contributions for a better world/organisation.

Creativity Skills

“What are creativity skills? asks Meredith Lewis.

Do you see yourself as curious, open-minded or imaginative? Read more in her post to figure out what may be your creativity skills and unique strengths.

Knowledge Sharing Muscles

“I miss the office chit-chat.” Sound familiar? Office banter is not the same in the era of distributed and remote work. Sharing knowledge and creating a personal connection with your team members requires a more conscious effort and learning to proactively tell about what you do and what you know.

In this bite-sized podcast episode, Luis Suarez shares his tips on how to grow your knowledge-sharing muscle and start creating conversations in your digital workspace.

Hear the 14 minutes of Arado Podcast: Learning to share knowledge and create a personal connection when working remotely to become aware of your work habits and develop new ones.

Some notes I took while hearing Luis:

Check your plan to clarify your objectives and share them with others. Develop a concise one-liner to describe your event. Do it for your emails, tasks, and meetings, too.

Choose a topic that you are passionate about and be willing to share it. Shared knowledge is power and a muscle to build with practice. Prioritise what you want to share. Do so with discernment.

Facilitate serendipity to yourself and your peers. Become comfortable sharing knowledge. People will get back to you as they find your shares helpful.

Silos < distributed work = abundant and infinite knowledge.

Build your muscles by sharing knowledge daily—one or two sentences to post on social or your schedule. It becomes a reflective exercise in your workflow. It also becomes a learning exercise from one to many times per day.

Plurality of Future Skills

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Following up on my latest post, ‘Seeds’, I continue to share my working and learning out’s activities for the past few weeks with a new post.

“Seed, feed, weed and breed.” — @Quinnovator & Dave Ferguson

Question #1

What does hybrid work mean to you?” asks @rhappe

Embracing synchronous and asynchronous ways to collaborate, co-create and cooperate within a distributed organization, team, network, and community – F2F and online.

Rachel Happe also tweeted:

“I like that definition a lot. Many miss the important place of asynchronous work.

I am finding that some people define hybrid as everyone remote most of the time, some as everyone comes to the office a few days a week, and the best are rethinking HOW they work.”

And this tweet:

“I was thinking recently about meeting roles and how all participants should have one (to make it a collaboration vs a presentation) and in those situations make one person in the room responsible for one person joining remotely to ensure they are included and can participate”

Question #2

Community professionals, what do you do to either give yourself a break or to refresh your creativity and productivity?” asks @jenny_community

I disconnect to find and connect the dots. Biking and walking, going to art exhibits, listening to music, watching movies/sports/fashion shows/documentaries, engaging in weekly or monthly community chats, and resting.

Question #3

How do you focus in a fragmented world?

“Is ‘not well’ an answer?

Otherwise, good network management hygiene, email tagging rules, and a structured notebook/planner to set intentions every day.” — @EngagedOrgs

Excellent practices—a blend between manual and automated efforts for the win.

For example, for setting daily/weekly intentions, I find it helpful to use Clickup and time blocking in my calendar to stay focused and manage better my energy.

Inner Development Goals (IDGs)

“Creativity is a mindset, an attitude, a way of life. It could also be seen as a set of habits. If you want to bring your creativity to the fore, then explore ways of bringing it into your life in myriad small acts” — Meredith Lewis

At the end of April, I participated in the online workshop ‘Wayfinding: Traveling between imagination and agency with the IDGs’, hosted by Meredith Lewis, Professional Listener. Serendipitist. Pamphleteer. Fascinating conversation collectively and in the breakout room with fellow smart creatives worldwide.

Thanks to Meredith again for hosting this gathering exceptionally. I very much enjoy the experience. She created the successful conditions and atmosphere to make insights and creativity emerge.

As she shared with us following up on the workshop, the IDGs website has excellent resources and information, including the deck she used, which is free for anyone to download and use.

Great. That is useful for hosting workshops on those skills.

In her IDGs blog post series, Meredith shares her thoughts and creative prompt for one of the sub-skill of each skills family. Here are below my thoughts and activities through my tweets, posted and upcoming in my stream:

#IDGs Being (Relationship to Self)

“How does the universe speak to you?

Which moments help you to ‘see’ yourself and, simultaneously, to see your place within the universe?”

Through activations & learning moments #WCIW

 

#IDGs Thinking (Cognitive Skills)

“Whose vision of the future do I want those who have yet to be born to be living in?” #WCIW

Workplace Futures

Learning futures

Futures thinking²

 

#IDGs Relating (Caring for Others & the World)

“(…) recall the last convo you participated in that was attended to with imagination and devotion.” #WCIW

A fantastic community explorers chat two weeks ago.

 

#IDGs Collaborating

“Who expanded your horizons? When? How?

Do U show others “new music”? Do U feel able to – why or why not?” #WCIW

Explorers

Insights patternists

Neo-generalists

 

#IDGs Acting (Driving Change)

“How did you come to the #IDGs Framework – what was your point of entry?” #WCIW

Thanks to you, @DangerousMere, on Twitter & via your newsletter ;-)

+ A 21st Century skills project a few years ago

Curated feeds

If creativity is about connecting dots, then you need to be intentional about collecting dots. As individuals, we have to continually expand our reference points, as teams, we have to deliberately curate conversations.” – Jillian Reilly

Did you enjoy the post? Check out the Tapestry Book.

“The first bud of spring sings the other seeds into joining her uprising.” ― Amanda Gorman

Happy Spring!

Enjoy below some gems I notice through my network and beyond.

On Blogging

“Why do you blog? What is your strategy behind blogging? What do you blog about?” — @bill_slawski

 

I blog to make sense. These are often half-baked ideas. Over time my blog has become my outboard brain. I blog mostly for myself. I write about learning, work, complexity, democracy, innovation, etc. My strategy over 18 years is just to write — http://jarche.com/blog” — @hjarche

 

“Same :) Blogging since 2008 for myself!” — @write2tg

 

To explore new territories (semiotic trails)@TheodoraPetkova

 

“I blog to learn. Every article I publish is an opportunity to dig deeper into a subject, simplify something complex, or clarify something confusing.” — @JonasSickler

I blog to research. Sometimes I turn the crème de la crème of posts into a book.

I blog to share deep thoughts about what caught my attention. I blog to observe ideas from interesting people, and to anchor/revisit stories, experiences, and practices.

Communities Engagement

Entrepreneurs Grand Jury

Being a Grand Jury member for the yearly Students-Entrepreneurs Contest Pépite made me engage locally with the academic and entrepreneurial ecosystem.

It was refreshing to hear work in progress and learnings from young instigators in higher education, construction, community building, social services, and environmental services. I am still pondering Silicon Valley’s model to build and scale startups.

Urgent optimism

According to Jane McGonigal, urgent optimism is a mindset and a practice. It combines mental flexibility, realistic hope and future power/actions for self-efficacy and collective efficacy. In addition, imagination, courage and deep collaboration skills are activated.

To practice and develop urgent optimism, I have been learning with a global community of urgent optimists/futurists since March 2022.

Travelling in Norway

I’ve enjoyed a few days off to Oslo, Norway and a few Norwegian cities one hundred miles away to hike in the woods and mountains, stroll in Oslo’s boroughs, and explore historical museums.

Great views from the Operahuset, Holmenkollen, and Sognsvann. I enjoyed walking in the boroughs of Vulkan, Bla, Vigeland and Frogner. Discovering Fredrikstad was quite an adventure!

It was refreshing and uplifting to travel and explore abroad again during the pandemic. But it felt weird and risky, too.

Next: Feed.

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“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

March. The month between the Lunar New Year and the Cambodian New Year. The month of World Futures Day. The month in which the world lives in uncertain and strange times with the pandemic and the crisis in Europe.

So what is the present and futures of Europe look like? Feeling powerless, so sad. What can we do?

We can donate and help, we can educate ourselves, we can make sense in networks, and perhaps activate our urgent optimism.

March. Each year, 8 March is International Women’s Day. I am so grateful for the women in my network and the communities of practice I engage.

Thank you for your empathy, kindness and nudges. Thank you for your questions, actionable insights and support. Thank you for your boldness, uniqueness, resilience and elegance.

Thank you for your exploration, curiosity, creativity, beauty and artistry. Thank you for your humour, ingenuity, vulnerability, attention, vibrancy, and energy.

Especially: Jillian Reilly, Klara Loots, Taruna Goël, Anne Marie Rattray, Ariele Good, Meredith Lewis, Delphine Hervot, Giliane Tardy, Sophie Villeneuve, Stéphanie Borniche, Anne Kazuro, Céline Schillinger, Helen Blunden, Jane McGonigal, Lieselotte König, Jane Hart, Marcia Conner, Rachel Happe, Sahana Chattopadhyay, Trish Wilson, Josie Gibson, Anne Ditmeyer, Cat Barnard, Jenny Gordon, Karilen Mays, Mara Tolja, Jennifer Sertl, Kare Anderson, Selma Crauser, Maëlys Longeac, Shirley Rivera, Jeanne Guilbert, Sibel Kilic, Ombeline Lenoble, Kéren Massamba, Emeline Toupry, Loélia Martins Babayou, Léa Jovic, Julie Kouassi, Louna Bourras, Charline Fournet, Sophie Dayon, Jade-Mengue Ateba, Tiffany Taleb, Catherine Lebon, Rita Meghdessian, Anaëlle Jorré, Christine Vaillant, Lallie Charrier, Célia Molieres, Zelal Kahraman, Manel Chaouali, Charlene Akichy, Maryse Sangarin, Léa Manyoo, Laurianne Despierre, Clara Machaj, Marion Guillerm, Sylvie Brion, Angélique Bour, Estelle Morin, Frédérique Dussaillant, Kate Ensor, Sarah Labyed, Nour Fanich, Bérénice Imbs, Nayah Yamarké.

As I put in this post last year:

The 8th March was also International Women’s Day. I am so grateful to women in my network and inspiring, who keep exploring and learning, supportive, impactful, thoughtful, helpful and respectful, along with my learning and work shifts.

I also watched the documentary from Yann Artus-Bertrand called ‘Woman ‘, which is beautiful and powerful, methinks.

March. The month when Spring will come. I can see how nature evolves and bloom when I go for a walk or a bike ride. The month of the release of The Batman movie, which goes back to the noir roots.

March, the month of the last brand new music opus of Stromae – Multitude, the Oscars ceremony, NCAA March Madness 2022, the Paralympics Winter Games, the SXSW festival and conference, the release of the Resilience Tech Report.

March. Is it the month when I am in motion, exploring, activating, rewinding my journey, updating my toolkit, staying curious, colliding, asking myself why, innovating, developing new capabilities and mindset, and embracing the unknown.

“I love March as it gives me hope that new beginnings are always beautiful” ― Anamika Mishra

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Before the pandemic, when we took a flight or onboarded a boat to travel from point A to B, we could feel the experience from the crew ship. On the same wavelength does this experience feel like going to the hospital when we join, are onboarded, welcomed, introduce ourselves, and are supported in a community of practice?

A community journey and experience kick start before the community is launched through an invite, resources sent in advance before the experience of an online platform and an engagement program or a learning program. For example, the invite to join a safe and trusted place to gather and do with fellow professionals focused on a location, field, profession, industry, or around shared values can be the starting point activated by the community host.

Before the invite, we may have met the host in person or online to get to know the person and the willingness to start a community for a specific purpose. Is it to learn together? To make sense together of a field, a theme, the world. To co-create? To support each other’s back?

Once we have joined the community, we may be welcomed, introduce ourselves, get an onboarding kit, and start connecting with fellow members on the platform with profiles, asynchronous chats, and many events – from workshops, live chats, meetups, hackathons, Q&A, coaching sessions, labs.

Another step is the community program. To keep levelling up our professional and personal practices and even change them. To know better ourselves and collectively, to find questions and answers on what we have deep inside us, inside out. To meet members on the same or divergent paths in their journeys, projects, and problems to make sense, activate or let go of.

A community program is shaped before, during and after it is run and hosted by the community program manager or many if there is a team behind-the-scenes and in the trenches. So, what does shape a community program? One that is appealing, engaging, and tailored to the member’s needs and contributions? Made by the community program management team and the community members for the members. I noticed from my experience in producing or participating in a few community programs – whether it is a coaching program, an ambassador program, a learning program – that they often have the following elements:

A website, a brochure with the goal, the program, the conditions, the modalities, the price, the host, and the type of participants expected.

An introductory blog post to clarify the why, what, when, where, how, who and what’s in it for me.

A promotional LinkedIn post or tweet to share the tagline and gain traction.

A short video to present the program by the community director.

Those assets can trigger in cascade:

Curiosity was aroused by the program’s benefits, skills, conditions, schedule, and pedagogy.

Willingness to join the cohort and meet the host, the white wolf in the discipline.

Desire to join the program and platform + to get the handbook if one is provided.

Engagement to do the community activities and contribute through curation and production of resources, giving and receiving feedback, questions, and thoughts from members by sharing, commenting, and connecting inside and outside the community platform.

Next level contribution to the community through co-creation of products and services with the community team.

Recognition of peers because you earned the sesame after completing the program. The certification or document to complete the program is optional. As well as badges.

Behind the community scene, the light guide, the energy of the host, time to program and publish the activities, the strategy thought through before the program’s launch, the test and learned of the program, the coherence and weaving of the activities, resources, nudges, questions. This is an important work that a community host did and thought deeply about. But, without clarity and concretisation of all those elements, it can be a kind of artisanal and freestyle way to host a community program one cohort at a time.

The design of a community program doesn’t have to follow the steps of a learning program design: analysing, designing, deploying, evaluating. Why? Because qualitative, tailored, and human engagement needs to be kept in mind when creating a community or engagement program, even if it is blurred with a learning program to develop skills, capabilities, and mindsets. What are the steps to design an engaging and tailored community program?

Spotting the needs and emotions of the members. What are the signals, social cues, and patterns?

Curating and weaving existing resources, activities, and questions and producing new ones if relevant and needed. What is your community’s state of content curation, production, and management?

Designing and testing the conditions and online space to make things happen for the host and the members. How can we evaluate and pick the right community platform for the environment and conditions so that the hosting team and members can thrive, feel safe, heard and seen?

Unleashing one week and a day at a time a learning /community activity with a few resources and one question to nudge members to reflect on the activity they did, on themselves or to share their practices and thoughts with the members. What does the content, event, and engagement programming look like?

Reviewing on our own, collectively, and in the future, the takeaways, lessons learned, and progress documented through tools, templates, and participation in the program.

What could be out of control? And it is ok—90% of lurkers, 10% of active members.

The pace and frequency of posts from the members on the online platform. They may do it when they want, when they can, how they want, anywhere there want.

How do members use the tools you suggest them to use. Some may prefer to go offline and in-person to meet and interact with other members through the event. Others may add video or audio calls and usages of the enterprise social network to keep on with the asynchronous chat and live to share. Some may use none of them.

The energy, tone and weather in your community are unpredictable. At the same time, it may depend on your content, event, and engagement programming. The more members felt seen and heard, the more they may love your community and community team to promote your community and be highly engaged in contributing to it.

Did you enjoy the post? Then, check out the Community Series.

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organisation’s ecosystem.

LEARN MORE

Time to continue a community series after I published last month a post on community reflection.

So here is a new curated write-up on starting and nurturing communities.

eiffel tower view garden

A view from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. I shot this photo.


Starting a community. From scratch, really?

“It’s not easy for a group of individuals, who do not know each other, to work collaboratively from the onset. It is even more difficult to ask that this collaboration occur online when the participants are not in the habit of working on the Internet. The practice of sharing needs to be joined with the tools that work for the culture. Finally, strategy includes the leadership, direction and project management of getting things going to work collaboratively online.

It’s important to get participants/members first used to processing their information flow online. A framework such as Personal Knowledge Mastery can be used, but each person must be given time to practice, connect and get feedback. The community also needs to be nurtured, one relationship at a time, as the creators of Flickr realized:”

“(…) Because culture is slow to change I would recommend starting with the simplest tool-set possible. Turn off most functions and only enable new ones when people start asking for more. As with tools, the same minimization principle goes for content. It is more important to build relationships and to draft the right people than it is to build the best content. Community trumps content online. Therefore, the focus should be on building connections.” —Harold Jarche

I can relate to what Harold wrote in his post when I recall my commitment to a startup when I worked and supported a network of offline facilitators of learning programs or circles. There was an academy to develop and hone the pedagogical approach to deploy and facilitate learning programs for organisations. A Slack was also used internally to connect the startup team and the facilitators to learn from each other’s facilitation experience in the trenches with the customers.

Still, the focus was on content and not so much on community, though. So how do we weave and wire members to learn faster and better together?

Building, & they will come. Not really.

Which approach do you use to start a community? Do you start with a community strategy and roadmap? Do you go straight to selecting an online platform and get the ball rolling? I hear what some experienced community professionals say when starting a community.

“The traditional way to start a community was to find a forum-based platform and invite your members to join. You initiate discussions and hope things take off.

And this is still the main approach for most brands today. The traditional approach gets the most attention not because it’s the best, but because it is the most visible when it works.

Yet your approach might be completely different – and that’s probably good. If you can’t reach a few thousand people, trying to launch a new community from scratch through a public forum probably isn’t the right approach. Increasingly, you get better results from targeting fewer people. And that’s probably going to mean using a non-traditional approach too.” — Richard Millington

Build, and they will come.

I have experienced and observed as an internal community manager or just an active member of some online communities – learning communities or communities of practice -different scenarios regarding using an online platform for the community. The community platform is the technology that hosts your community network.

Scenario 1: The platform as an enabler to power the community

The community platform is already existing before I join the community. So, I got an invitation via email to join after I met the community leader in person through a video call or in person. The onboarding is seamless.

I felt welcome, heard and saw one conversation – live and asynchronously – at a time. The host of the community is available and inclusive. We learn within the community continuously and grow organically. It lasts over months, quarters and years.

The community becomes one of the important ways to develop ourselves, make sense of the world and our experience, reflect and decide better.

Scenario 2: The platform is here. What’s next?

There is no community platform yet. So, the community leader has set up a new one to test the water and invite new members to join the club. Sometimes the architecture of a sandbox is done and is even tested with beta testers. Sometimes nothing is done at all. All the default features of the community platform are activated.

So, the members could be lost as there is no virtual peer assistance to onboard or support the members to navigate the platform, find the correct information to join the conversation on video calls or chats, and post something and connect with the members.

The community becomes a ghost town or desert because the community manager hasn’t worked on the content, event, and engagement programming and built a relationship with one member at a time.

Scenario 3: Ain’t no platform, so what?

No community platform is used. Instead, there is a combination of email to announce events, share news and knowledge through a newsletter, video calls for meetups, webinars, conferences and sometimes workshops. I see different intents here:

Gaining attention and traction from the participants who can be customers, partners, or thinkers in a host’s network.

Carrying on the business and personal relationship of the network through paid events or products to connect to specialists and generalists, access resources (ebooks, curated knowledge, workshop), recording conversations, text chats, transcripts, additional resources (blog posts, newsletters, Q&A).

So can we have a great community experience without spending a lot of bucks for a community platform by combining Slack or a WhatsApp group, a blog for announcements, and Zoom for meetings? Is it possible to build an audience via those tools if we start from scratch a community? Do we need to consider upgrading with a professional community platform to have better search traffic, follow discussions, and share information seamlessly?

How about letting know people about the new community experience you have? How is that the knowledge is lost or not findable in one day? Yet, people keep asking questions and find it hard to follow the conversation when they use Slack or IM messaging tools?

Which scenario(s) have you encountered with your internal community for your organisation or as an individual?

By the way, what the heck is a community? The Community Roundtable defines community as:

A community is a group of people with shared values, behaviours, and artefacts.”

rotana ty workplace learning performance collective intelligence

It is a shot taken during an exhibition on migration in the Mac Val Museum, France.


Starting small & with the needs

What are the conditions to make communities work from the early days of their birth and launch?

Are there any cells or gems of a community before a host or community manager comes and gathers the group to learn, grow, and become independent together?

Then, who can be in touch with you to know that you are instigating a new community?

If you’re starting a new community, you need to invert this thought process. Spend the first two hours of your day reaching out to and engaging with prospective members of the community. Simply tell them you’re launching a community soon and are keen to learn from their expertise. Then squeeze in all the other activities around this” — Richard Millington

Before getting in touch, it starts with knowing the folks, their identity, intent, superpowers, needs and possible contributions?

Rachel Happe, founder of Engaged Organizations and The Community Roundtable, wrote in the Community Manager Handbook:

“Starting small also made it easier to build online and offline trust, which was critical to the research value of the community. Adding members to a trusting community proved much easier than establishing trust in a large community would have been.

Do the right thing for your members and your community, and build the business to support that,” says Rachel.

Then have confidence and patience to let it succeed.

Patience and confidence. Things don’t happen overnight. It takes efforts, time and serendipity to see the low hanging fruits of trusted relationships, possible collaboration and cooperation, and support between members.

What I have experienced through some global communities since the pandemic hit.

And it starts with the needs first, rather than focusing on features of a technology.

Starting with your needs, rather than features, is the smart approach.

“Different types of community structures will have very different platform requirements. Size, purpose, technical skills, support and security needs and other factors will all play roles in your choice.

But starting with your needs, rather than features, is the smart approach. After all, in the end it’s not about choosing the right platform. It’s about choosing the right platform for your community.” — The Community Manager Handbook


Enhancing your community’s potential

“Working across boundaries – any boundaries. Brings such rich potential – wide experience, differing thought & ideas, diverse perspectives, creativity … Relies on generosity of spirit, humility, curiosity, listening, open minds, kind hearts, meaning & purpose. Rests on trust.” — @brigidrussel51

If people want to create shared meaning, they need to talk about their experience in close proximity to its occurrence and have a common platform for conversation. They need to see their different views about the experience as richness and a prerequisite to learn what is going on.” — @EskoKilpi

“… the system and self are very much connected and we can not change the system without changing ourselves as well. That means learning to slow down, be present and show up with an open mind, open heart and courage to embrace uncertainty, unlearn old behaviors and learn new ones.” — @sonjak18

Did you enjoy the post? Then, check out the Community Series.

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organization’s ecosystem.

LEARN MORE

Fall is here. Leaves, nuts, mushrooms, grey, raining, sunny and windy days are coming as we live the Indian summer’s last days. Every year I enjoy this season very much.

lake fall trees grand paris

A photo I shot in le Grand Paris during a Fall stroll.

This shift makes me revisit thoughts, experiences, and engagement within online communities and community projects and revisit the discipline of community management. In addition, I am observing community patterns and learning leading practices.

I have noticed the shift from public social networks to private online communities with the pandemic. To be felt, seen and heard. To be supported and uplifted by fellow explorers, seekers and instigators in a turbulent and ever-changing world.

I also became aware of how we engage in one conversation and community at a time, on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. From meetups and coffee chats to webinars to live chats. From learning programs to virtual peer assistance. There is a framework to enable organisations and individuals, especially community professionals, to assess the efficacy and depth of their engagement maturity, strategy and actions. Each year we can discover the state of community management through a report and webinar from The Community Roundtable that brings clarity with research and trends on the work of mavens and game-changing networked organisations.

Engaging within Communities

I have gained perspectives on different roles: from being a member and a host to being an internal community strategist and manager.

As an active member of global communities – communities of practice, and learning communities focused on learning and work futures. I am immersed in getting to know and support members, sharing knowledge, experience, and reflecting. To make sense of our complex and changing world. To develop habits, practices and approaches from disciplines such as community management, futures thinking and personal knowledge mastery, and to decide better.

We may make and close triangles and other shapes from those gatherings – flat or in 3D. What works and what doesn’t work for networks weaving/convening?

“Making your network smarter is one aspect of leadership in our digitally connected world and so is convening the best parts of your network in order to address complex issues and make decisions. In crises, sometimes perfection is the enemy of the good, so having a diverse, knowledgeable, and experienced group of advisors becomes critical.” — @hjarche

I learn faster because I feel safe, seen, and heard within a private online space with practitioners worldwide. Because there is trustworthiness built and nurtured one conversation, week/month/quarter/year at a time. Through coffee chats, meetups, webinars and asynchronous chats on instant messaging or community platforms.

communautés réflexion community management reflection engagement learning practice leadership manager

View from the top of La Samaritaine, Paris, France.

Bundling Forces

Is there room for improvement for potential cooperation and collaboration between members to instigate anything? Whether it is a small artefact or project, a bigger one or a community/learning program to onboard, develop, and even offboard members.

How can we make gatherings work better to work smarter together through distributed work and networked learning?

How can we unleash the value of asynchronous chats and live Zoom chats, reduce the Zoom fatigue, and level up the low engagement of members that inevitably occurs after waves of high engagements?

Our professional development can be propelled through online communities and could be the gateway to explore possible collaborative projects if:

We would activate the strengths, knowledge flows, and intents if there are/, are the host(s) who foster, boost and nurture waves of events, contents, and engagements touchpoints.

The active members know the why they gather and engage – whether it is for their work lifestyle integration, enhancing their learning and community potential/performance, and bringing back their humanity in a world of constraints, uncertainty and hyper-connectedness.

“There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.” via @brainpicker


Being in Community Motion

As a host of gatherings, conversations and activities such as the community book club and the host of future skills workshops. I enjoy being the master of ceremony, host, animation,r and the captain of cohort/group/crew to observe how social dynamics evolve fast and slow over one hour or day, whether through online community book clubs or F2F workshops to develop social skills.

I noticed through my experience that it is about the energy that comes from me. It can be supercharged when people come together with resources: curated and created content, learning circles, silence and chatty moments. We use collaborative tools and analogue, physical movement and peer observations/feedback.

It is also about the velocity and serendipity of conversations and the random collision of participants who may be reassured to know what the plan of an event is in the kick-off of a workshop or a book club. But then we do something completely different and unique with outputs they/I haven’t predicted. It is about embracing not knowing and exploring at large with our boundless curiosity. This is about innovating to test the water, making sense by looking back to look forward while activating our superpowers, actionable insights and small caring networks and communities.

And the journey doesn’t stop when the workshop or the book club stops. It can and must continue through follow up resources, future sessions or reviews of past ones to convene and keep developing members of doers.

white swan lake

The Lake of White Swans, Le Grand Paris, France.


Riding the Community Waves

As an internal community manager of learning and community program to develop future skills and scale engagement. This work can include:

Scoping a distributed work and networked learning program, activities and resources to develop future work capabilities, mindset and toolset.

Contributing to the learning design of the program: co-creation of innovative pedagogical events, content and engaging touchpoints to make the community members work, learn and reflect together.

Onboarding, accompanying and offboarding each member based on their context, needs and constraints in the context of the pandemic.

Coordinating and hosting gatherings as a generous and professional host/leader within the learning community/community of practice/centre of excellence that went remote and distributed.

Programming F2F and digital events, content and engagement times to generate and propel community members’ active engagement and professional development.

Providing pedagogical, mental and technological virtual peer assistance through social presence, many actions, resources, and a community team.

Working on community measurement and metrics to work on indicators and improvements that matter to the organisation.

Putting on the spotlight the crème de la crème of active members – profiles, productions, actionable insights from conversations, projects and results through a consistent and meaningful editorial calendar, distribution and amplification of social posts, scale of the minimum viable audience, and retrospective and synthesis for the collective intelligence.

This work can be exciting, energising and draining, especially when there is only one community manager who brings continuous real-time and asynchronous support to members who need assistance on pedagogical or technological issues regarding the learning program or the community platform we use. The fuel in the community movement takes patience and effort and is rewarding waves after waves of support, conversation and motion.

There will always be a cycle of engagement with highs and lows. Vibrant live and asynchronous conversations, events and movements and other times are when the community is like a ghost town or a desert.

Many executives conflate online social networks with online communities and because of this miss the opportunity, continuing to view engagement as potentially polarizing and risky. Yet well-managed communities offer safe learning environments that contribute positively to an organization’s brand and culture, with no associated risk. This then is the opportunity for all organizations who hope to thrive in the digital era – and current community leaders are showing us the way.” — Shannon Abram


Activating Communities & Engagement Leadership

What are the heck communities made for? In a 1-1 conversation with a global chief learning officer of a large organisation, we reflected on communities of practice and learning communities.

A community of practice enables behaviour change as activities are unleashed and done within them. We make sense and decide better. We share and hand over content, stories, and experiences within learning communities. We activate our superpowers and wings. We have each other’s back and peer support as we bounce back and go onward and upwards. A learning community becomes powerful when it becomes a community of practice as resources are activated, and the action continues.

Still, it would start with engagement leadership and digital communities, as shared by Céline Schillinger in her video. Some notes from what I heard:

The way we think, behave and do is part of engagement leadership. Work as interactions, as Esko Kilpi said. We are part of different networks. There is a shift from audience to co-creators. Passive to active.

A catalyst for new connections and coherence is leadership in communities. We are pulling people together instead of pushing. It is about targets, not brands, but hearts, souls, and participants of creators. We expand sensemaking from executives and experts to everyone. The pandemic challenges how we work together, bond and build trust together. Digital communities are hard to engage because we are all remote, stressed and overloaded.

What can we do? 1. Adapting our systemic leadership, i.e. to the principle of complex adaptive systems. 2. Bringing digital diversity: using asynchronous chats and wikis, not just Zoom, to reinvent conversations. 3. Paying attention to our online presence – how you show up matters a lot, and show how you contribute as a digital global citizen.

“How to maintain engagement with your community? How do you dance with complexity?”


Introducing the Community Series

Based on my experience, education, curation and thinking, I share a series of blog posts on the art and discipline of community management.

Do you reflect on the purpose of your community to enhance its potential?

What does inspire you in your community?

What insight do you learn from it?

What do you think of your work with your crew in your community?

What can you do together now and in the future?

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organisation’s ecosystem.

LEARN MORE

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker – Notes from a Community Book Club & Resources

This Summer, I hear the audiobook, The Art of Gathering, written by Priya Parker. I intended to participate in the community book club during Tech Thursday 2021, brought by The Community Roundtable. Unfortunately, I could not join the live conversation. However, I had the chance to review the replay. Below are my notes from the insightful discussion.

the art of gathering book cover

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker


The Art Of Gathering Resources

When, why and where do we come apart/gather together? Learn more through the book, the website, and a New York Times podcast called Together apart.

About Gathering

Every time three people or more come together for a purpose with a beginning, a middle and an end. A gathering is a technical unit you can hold and close. Different from a community. The life of groups enables people to do their work temporary: marrying people or creating products.

Common Mistakes of Gathering


The purpose is obvious.

Ask about your purpose as an educator instead of asking yourself how to teach your discipline online in the context of the pandemic.

Assuming the activity is the purpose.

To serve your purpose to serve people. Don’t be fixed with your profession and activity to meet your purpose. Instead, figure out ways and which to serve your purpose beyond a fixed label in your mind.

For a birthday celebration, ask yourself what you need right now/who you are to invite and host this event. Will people commit to come, stay and contribute to your event and the activity you purposefully facilitate? The activity reveals a part of yourself to the community.

Don’t start with questions such as: how to make the event more fun, productive etc… Start with the purpose. Is it crystal clear? Obvious? Did you skip it?

Assuming we need to cut out what is behind: the context/universe of one person/organization

Each person has their universe. It can be shown purposefully or not.

Importance of the Host Role

The role of the host/community manager is more critical than ever in the pandemic context. Check chapter three: ‘Don’t Be a Chill Host’. Instead, use your generous authority, i.e. your power, to determine the purpose as a host.

Help people to understand how to work during that time. Don’t surrender your power because you leave yourself to each other. As a host, connect the guest with a common purpose and to each other. The host protects the guests from each other and equalizes everyone, especially on video calls.

Code of Conduct

Have a virtual code of conduct on Zoom, Meet etc… It starts when the guest discovers the future promise of the event, i.e. the invitation. With the pandemic, there is no more journeying time like driving and commuting times to go to events. It is more and more about entering and leaving buttons for online events. So as a community/host, recreates this journeying time/feeling of entering the doorway and leaving it as we would physically do, even for a 60 min gathering.

For instance, the rise of the global movement of creating a painting from home. It starts with people joining a Facebook group initially, but they had to read ten rules shared on the group before that. So a threshold/code of conduct/social contract was created to filter and foster high premium production of paintings.

Use your ton to protect people and enable them to be free to work/create/produce something together, personal or professional outputs.

Magic Numbers in the Context of the Pandemic

Use the ones mentioned in the book and turn them down by 20% for each number. Even in face-to-face and Zoom calls. Pace changes. Takes longer—less attention span. So don’t squeeze things.

Achievable and accessible: make your event stands for them. Ask people: what is essential? The question of the 21st Century.

Connecting People to Work Together

Every group has questions or one that will break and open, which will hit the nervous system of the group. It is the work of the host to figure it/them out. Can you help shift the dynamics when people conflict to affect the outside world better? Ask yourself:

What are the questions that serve the group and the purpose?

How can we connect people so that they can work together?

For instance, a multidisciplinary team within an industry from different professions, hierarchies and companies of big pharma to work on maternal mortality.

Type of question: what is the one thing people would immediately recognize by looking at your mother?

Purposefully ask first the reverse role of that question: the husband instead of the wife.

Connection is not the end of the purpose. Connection is a tool. You need to ask: what is the purpose? How do I serve the purpose? This group needs to know/protect each other to serve the purpose and work collectively.

Incorporating the Dark Theme in Gatherings

What does the group avoid? What are the risks to help it to face it? Is the gift worth the risk? Our work as community managers affects how we design spaces for our communities and clients. If the activity you design – such as bringing and Q&A on a hidden/forbidden object from your home – serves the purpose.

Use dialogue to explore that space. Use languages, songs, and metaphors. Find meanings through conversations as a host and with people.

Assisting Better the Ending of a Gathering

Open and close properly. Opening: give context and what’s ok here. Closing: close the world you’ve created together. Closing is the moment for meaning-making. What did inspire/learned you here? On Zoom, nudge people to use the chat to make the meaning of their gathering.

For instance, some weddings on Zoom are fire chats, and others are just blank chats. As a host, I help people make meaning together and in front of each other, such as in the brunch the day after the wedding. Use magical questions to open the group and other ones to close the group.

What did inspire you here?

What insight do you learn from here?

What do you think of the work we did here?

What might we do together in the future?

What do you commit to doing after this event as an individual?

The Art of Gathering & Supporting People

Facilitate meaningful and structured gatherings to cope with the impact on mental health in the context of grief and unprecedented times of loss. Help people to process together with rituals you hold.

When you live in different worlds, be outside a little bit of your both worlds to see both worlds. Navigate what you bring ahead, invent, bring along for the ride, and leave behind when you host gatherings with purpose.

Final Thoughts by Priya Parker

Share how and why you gather. The gathering is contagious. We create norms by gathering through and with each other purposefully and courageously. You permit me to do the same.

Thoughts

As a participant and facilitator of learning circles, host of future skills workshops, and internal community manager for startups and their customers, hearing this book and reviewing notes from the community book club make me rethink the ways and which we gather in the flow of life and work in the context of the pandemic and beyond.

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organization’s ecosystem.

LEARN MORE

New month, new possibilities.

When time allows, I will share a curated post—the topic of July: six ways to start with art and heart for work, learning and leadership. Read on what caught my attention.

Artful

“art is a p(art) of every st(art)”  @johnmaeda

 

“Art, or as I call it heART, is not a skill, a process or a tool for coping and entertaining. It is the very essence at the center of our being that when evoked and practiced helps us create new paradigms.

(…) “Learning is messy and non-linear. It becomes wisdom as we experience that messiness in full. Living fully (heARTfully) might require we start learning to listen to that messiness, not to control it but to express it with beauty and harmony.” — @FBanishoeib

Pandemic Haiku

“No longer asking Who will sink and who will swim? Together we rise”
Caitlin M. Aamodt

I also share my Pandemic haiku after a hike I did in the mountain of the Alps. Explore more in this blog post on the new heights I reached.

Work Futures

“To me, remote implies a physical distance, while distributed is more about the connections, the conversations & interactions.” — @elsua HT @sorokti

 

“Great list of resources to explore the future of learning/future of work https://rotanaty.com/2020/10/25/communities” — @rhappe

Networks & Systems

“A system is never the sum of its parts. It is the product of its interactions.” — Russell Ackoff HT @PaulJocelyn

 

“Network value is about individual contribution and team contribution and organizational contribution. All connected.

Network value is all working with some agility and some replicable and some speed and some slowing down. Network value is complex and dynamic.

Network value is people, nested systems, working within a system. Network value is systems thinking.” — Bruce McTague

“When you discover someone who sums up what you have been saying for 15 years in one, elegant sentence. I do still like the Red Queen analogy though T/y for the intro @rotanarotana” — @rhappe

Tapestry goes through my flâneur’s journey over 63 pages of my personal learnings, stories and reflections in an e-book format. I share my story through thoughts, experience, practices, inspirations, nudges, and questions to work and learn continuously in a networked world.

READ MORE

Inside Out

“But my introversion is my super-power. As an introvert I spend time with myself, constantly reconnecting with my personal values and priorities. As an introvert I find the space to reflect, analyse, and strategize.

There is nothing timid, silly, or weak about the quietness of the introvert. It is not an effacing of assertiveness; it’s a gathering of strength.” — @DangerousMere

“When I am silent, I have thunder hidden inside.” Rumi

Storms can gift solace to the soul.

Thunder, and wind, at the 20 second mark.

I treasure nature’s gifts, large and small.

#sixtysecondsolitudeHal Gregersen

Leadership

#Regenerative #leadership calls for a profound paradigm shift from the present models of leadership characterized by power, control, assertiveness, aggression, competition, and ‘winner takes all’ mindset.

Regenerative Leaders are facilitators and stewards of their organizations, communities, societies. They put their businesses in service to life, not the other way round.” — @sahana2802

leadership

leadership

source: @sahana2802

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

Potential and conversational.

Distributed Work & Soft Skills

What are the predominant soft skills when working anywhere, aka distributed work?

This is a question we had in our Perpetual Beta Coffee Club at the end of Spring 2020. Below is the take from the host of the PBCC, Harold Jarche, on distributed work.

tetrad of working from anywhere

Source: distributed work by Harold Jarche

What the heck are soft skills? Why are they essential in the context of distributed work?

“Soft skills separate humans from machines. They are permanent skills. For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

This requires a rethinking of how we categorize work, define jobs, attract and retain talent. It should be based on talent, not labour. It also means a rethinking of our entire education system. These permanent (soft) skills are not developed through standardized curriculum based on temporary (hard) skills. It’s time to take the long-term view on human work and learning. What was categorized as Labour is merely a temporary skill for market and technological conditions. Talent, or permanent skills, is our long-term value as humans to each other.“ ― @hjarche

I was involved in a startup to enable organizations and individuals to develop life skills in our modern and connected world.

Lately, I have noticed that soft skills development and evaluation themes resurface through my network and weak ties. As I tweeted:

How can we develop and [self-]evaluate soft skills, especially creativity, collaboration, communication, creativity? And cooperation? https://blog.learnlets.com/2021/04/evaluating-soft-skills

A question that has resurfaced in two learning and community projects as a tough challenge to tackle and explore.

I ponder what we did with our teams and learning communities in previous projects through questions. For example, is it worthwhile to assess soft skills in the workplace?

“Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.” — @CharlesHGreen

And those tweets I noticed:

“If you think that training can address what are called ‘soft skills’, then you are already going in the wrong direction.” — @hjarche


From Soft Skills to Power Skills

How about power skills instead of soft skills?

“I love the term ‘power skills’ instead of soft skills. Interestingly the roles needs are still listed as specific hard skills. To improve power skills, organizations are going to need therapists, psychologists, and community managers – not seeing that on anyone’s roadmap. https://twitter.com/ChrisMayer_WP/status/1330162129316556805” — @rhappe

What does your future/power skills galaxy look like? What are your power skills development strategy, roadmap, and action maps?

In my previous post about activation through the visual from a skills framework, I shared my current exploration in progress.

future skills research work learning leadership community management health mind futures thinking foresight visual rotana ty

Future Skills Map produced by Rotana Ty


Towards Your Power Skills Matrix

If we go deeper into each skills family, here are below each sub-skill you can consider developing and honing. Discover more through the hyperlink per sub-skill.

You may use this table to create your skills family and sub-skills puzzle with a rate on a scale of 1 to 5 for each sub-skill. The total score per skills family gives you a self-assessment and knowledge about your current state of skillsets you have.

Last but not least, you can do so every quarter, every half-year or year to observe your personal growth and the professional development needed.

Learning & Working Skillset
Skills Family Skills Family Skills Family Skills Family Skills Family
Personal Knowledge Mastery Working From Anywhere Innovation Learning Agility Mindsets
Sense-making Cross-cultural competency Novel and adaptive thinking 

Futures Thinking

Social learning Perpetual Beta
Social intelligence Design Mindset Computational thinking

Strategic thinking

Active learning & learning strategies Grit
New media literacy Distributed work Transdisciplinary

Neo-Generalism

Coaching

Mentoring

Mind management
Cognitive load management Complex problem-solving Rapid prototyping,

testing & iteration

Action learning Beyond the Growth Mindset

Sources that can help you create your table of learning and working skillsets:

The ten most important work skills

These are the top 10 job skills of tomorrow – and how long it takes to learn them | World Economic Forum

PKM Workshop | Harold Jarche

Community Management Skillset
Skills Family Skills Family Skills Family Skills Family Skills Family
Content Engagement Business Strategy Technical
Communication planning Listening & analyzing Program management Community strategy development System admin & configuration
Writing Response & escalation Business Model Development Roadmap development Data collection & analysis
Graphics & Design Moderation & conflict facilitation Budget & financial management Policy & guideline development Tools evaluation & recommendations
Multimedia production Promoting productive behaviours Team hiring & management Needs & competitive analysis Technical support
Narrative development Empathy & members’ support Contractor hiring & management Measurement, benchmarking & reporting Member database management
Editing Facilitating connections Selling, influencing & evangelizing Trendspotting & synthesizing Platform architecture & integration
Curation New members recruitment Community advocacy & promotion Consulting Technology issue resolution
Program & event planning New member welcoming Training development & delivery Executive coaching Software & application programming
Taxonomy & tagging management Member advocacy Vendor management Content strategy development UX & Design
SEO & internal search optimization Behaviour change & gamification Governance management Evaluating engagement techniques Algorithm design & data manipulation

The source that can help you to create your table of community management skillsets:

Community Skills Framework™ by The Community Roundtable

From Skills to Capabilities

What if the lens of skills needs to be taken to another level? Capability, capacity, context, conversation, community, choice, and cultivating conditions. Anne Marie Rattray dives deep with her article. An extract:

“Capability

I have been thinking and writing about developing skills in the flow of work but wondered recently watching ‘Tomorrow’s teams today: Building capabilities needed to transform’, from the McKinsey Academy, if my focus on skills is perhaps misplaced. Should I be talking about capability instead? The reason I had focused on skills is because I see them as an outcome of action and applied knowledge, which in turn depend on capability and capacity.”

After much mulling, I prefer to follow the McKinsey Academy’s lead and talk about capability. It suggests potential for action. Plus, capability is more encompassing. It applies to both individuals and organisations.”

“(…) Capacity

If capability is about potential for action, capacity is about the conditions that enable potential to be realised. People need capacity – personal and organisational – to be able to build capability. That means time, space and place, energy, opportunity, freedom, plus access to social networks, resources, technologies, and performance support systems.” Anne Marie Rattray

Where do working from anywhere and cultivating capability start?

No easy answer, right? Perhaps, it starts with actionable insights from a fellow seeker and PBCC community member, Luis Suarez:

WFA [Work From Anywhere] extends individual labour, obsolesces the office, retrieves the written word, and could reverse into digitally connected sweatshops.’

That’s quite a punch line Harold Jarche has put together on this fine blog post 👉🏻 https://bit.ly/3xd3CUk reflecting on #DistributedWork.

‘The best way to communicate with a distributed team is in writing, especially when you factor in multiple time zones. Good writing skills will become critical in a distributed workplace.’

Couldn’t have agreed more with that statement, although I’d also add #SenseMaking (a la #PKMastery) will become just as critical to today’s digital workplace. Why? Well, read below 👇🏻

‘In 2020 Prodoscore looked at 90,000 data points from 7,000 workers. One interesting finding was that high performers regularly used voice & video less often than low performers. The tool of choice for high performers was messaging & chat’.

Talking about re-thinking the purpose of one’s work in a distributed workplace! Whoaaah! Video/Voice alone, indeed, are not longer good enough.

Mastering the art of facilitating two-way conversations is where the game is at … (It always has been all along! 😅👍🏻)” ― @elsua


So how do you master the art of conversation while working and learning from anywhere?

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organization’s ecosystem.

READ MORE
Helen Blunden

“I love @rotanarotana way of being able to capture what he’s learning and working on each day https://rotanaty.com/2021/03/15/motion – the title most fitting “motion” because without that we’d be standing still, not growing or developing. Taking stock of what we do and how we do it.”

Harold Jarche

“An example of a week of ‘narrating our work’, by @rotanarotana https://rotanaty.com/2021/03/15/motion #PKMastery” 

I continue to make sense of and narrate my work and learn out loud as I did in mid-March. So what did I do in the last weeks of March and early April? To read more, click on each title below.

Writing, editing, designing, formatting and converting my ebook made me realise that self-publishing is what I do and will continue to do. I am grateful to a few beta readers for their feedback, encouragement and suggestions while sharing my book progress in the draft and beta versions. Finally, the editing of my ebook is done.

I have figured out how to design and format my book on Word to convert it into formats ready for self-publishing. In addition, I have worked on the design of my book cover and finally picked my ebook title.

Within our global community of fellow explorers, we have weekly collective art experience remotely. One session was hosted by our fellow explorer and one of the community hosts, Klara Loots. It was a real treat to see how a fellow explorer is so creative, inspiring and deliberately curating and creating meaningful life and work with an entourage full of artists, craftsmen/women, wondrous artefacts, and love.

I have continued to participate in the PKM workshop. I am slower to go with the knowledge flows than in 2020. I revisit what I noted, reflected on, produced, and made sense of last year from each introduction, activity, tip, and link unleashed over time in the remote asynchronous workshop guided by Harold Jarche.

I also accept not following the order of the activities released every other day. For instance, I jumped from activity four on ‘human filters’ to activity seven on understanding media. With the global cohort, I shared my updates oldies to examine one technology at a time with McLuhand’s tetrad:

Shift to communities and random collisions.

Workplace futures.

Effects of video and effects of audio.

In another activity related to ‘sensemaking’, we are also invited to pick a tool among the directory of learning and performance tools compiled by Jane Hart, play with it, make notes as we experiment with it on our own, and revisit it after the workshop our notes and if it still makes sense to use the tool. I picked a tool not in the directory: OBS Studio, for the virtual camera to attend or host web meetings through video conferencing. There are a lot of possibilities with this tool. From presenting web content professionally, live streaming, and recording ourselves.

I still play with the tool and figure out how to use it through how-tos on Youtube. This tool is a handy way to present ourselves in web meetings or events. I will also check out who uses OBS Studio and how with my network.

I continue reading and using David Amerland’s book, ‘The Sniper Mind‘. I am impressed by the depth of research and writing of the author. Paul Simbeck-Hampson highly recommended reading the book. This book is about mind management, thought discipline, and the science behind how our brain works.

It is full of insights from snipers whom the author interviewed. The latest finding on neuroscience, real-life stories and, business cases, experiments help us understand what drives us and how we self-improve in our life, health and work. I had no clue about neuroscience and snipers, but I know I strive for excellence, activating my strengths and capabilities. This book helps me build my mental, physical and emotional toughness and responsiveness. My quest to self-improve while looking into myself, finding out my fear, what cannot stop me, and why and how I can make better decisions to act.

I am still catching up with the community management space’s latest practices through a few podcasts, newsletters, blog posts, and an online course. So I dived deep into the online course from The Community Roundtable Academy on Community 101 to get certified and explore the four frameworks and models that form the foundation of a thriving community program.

One of the activities, The Community Skills Framework, invites us to identify and understand our skills gaps and rate ourselves on a scale of 1-5 for each skill. That way, we can get a score per community skills family and see which are the main ones to focus on for our professional development goals within the year and beyond. After I did this exercise, what struck me was that my top community skills are:

1. Content skills

Editing. Curation. Taxonomy & Tagging Management.

I have always been into the content universe as I love working with content excellence, blogging and self-publishing. This skill set helps me to develop and produce community content and programs. The contents are strategised and used to fit into an overall community narrative at a higher level.

2. Technical skills

Community Systems Administration. Technical Support. Member Database Management.

It is often the lowest skill for community managers as they don’t need them first. However, improving these skills family is a great way to increase our community team’s value. These are the notes I took while hearing and hitting pause during the course. Over a few community projects I did with startups and their customers, I felt they were pregnant primarily when the community went online, sometimes global, and working remotely and anywhere.

3. Engagement skills

Empathy & Member Support. Listening & Analyzing. Moderation & Conflict Facilitation. Promoting Productive Behaviors. Facilitating Connections.

Skills of any community manager for his daily work to build and grow communities to lead them. In this course, we also dig deep into the Community Engagement Framework with its four stages: validate, share, ask and answer, and explore – out loud. My professional engagements as an internal community manager, membership in a few global communities of practices and learning communities, and this course from TheCR Academy made me rethink how online engagement is measured in meaningful and relevant ways.

What do the stage of the community and the culture looks like? Passive, reactive, open or proactive. Is it a networked community or not? Do we see a community culture that is passive and reactive? Do members feel comfortable enough to take ownership of problems and solutions?

Those three community skills families or disciplines inform me that I am heading toward a Community Specialist Role. Experience and time will tell me which one I focus on while exploring strategic initiatives and projects to support a community team to thrive. I look forward to becoming a bridge between community members of an organisation and a community team.

I am now certified by The Community Roundtable Academy for completing the courses:

Community 101 | Community Frameworks and Models

“This badge denotes successful completion and certification by The Community Roundtable of the fundamental online community course, Community Models and Frameworks. This is a lifetime certification.”

Online Community Fundamentals

“The Community Roundtable’s Online Community Fundamentals course for new community managers outlines the scope of the community manager role in communities and provides prescriptive approaches for successful community management.”

Community Program Essentials

“The Community Roundtable’s Community Program Essentials course covers key topics in community program management. The course is aimed at professionals looking to grow their community program management skills and focuses on creating the strategic, operational and technical elements to make communities succeed within the larger organizational context.”


The map that I created and included in another blog post has evolved with my work on:

The Community Skills Framework from The Community Roundtable.

Four core work skills to develop through the Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop of Harold Jarche.

Future work skills from the IFTF.

Work skills from the World Economic Forum.

Here is below my updated version of my future skills galaxy.

future skills research work learning leadership community management health mind futures thinking foresight visual rotana ty

I see overlaps and found dots between skills, family, and sub-skills that we can leverage and activate on our own and in any team, network and community. What does your future skills galaxy look like?

Future Skills Workshop is hosted remotely over six weeks to discover future skills for your personal and professional growth. Then, apply your insights in your working and learning context.

LEARN MORE

We connect monthly with IFTF and fellow alumni from various industries and locales for a fun hour, sharing insights around our foresight practices. Often there is one host and futures thinking specialists from the IFTF’s ecosystem who shares their passion, work and journey. It is inspiring to hear and see the lessons learned while developing and enacting an initiative on futures thinking, whether a program, artefacts, products or services.

The best part of those monthly sessions is in the breakout rooms, where we meet and discuss with a small group of members over our introduction and a question suggested by the community hosts. Do we see smiles on the video calls when all the participants gather after the breakout room? What insights and takeaways do one member of the small group share? Who do you see as the regular participants of those meetups?

I have observed that hosting learning and networking experiences with a plan or none is becoming common in a few global communities.

Spring is here. Third lockdown in Paris, too. I still need to go for a walk and tea time away from the screens, gain clarity and stay sane. Biking is also another way to unplug, be in the flow and stay fit. I enjoy those moments very much.

Next: Potential and conversational.

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I tweeted:

“Participating for the second time in the #PKMastery workshop to revisit, develop and refine my work and learning practices with a global cohort and @hjarche https://twitter.com/hjarche/status/1365337275656200202

I participated in 2020 in the Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop. Each week, we are guided by Harold Jarche every other day. Last week, I perused the activities and resources shared in our private workshop’s platform. We are invited to start narrating our work. What did I do last week?

Click on each day to read more.

I unfollowed everyone on Linkedin after reading this helpful and thoughtful blog post by Helen Blunden on mass deletions and deactivations. It felt weird and good to see nothing in my stream to regain focus. So I try to go slow each weekend and away from social streams for my sanity.

As I started the new week, I thought about discerning who I connect with and following on LinkedIn and media tools to keep learning, discussing, and exploring together. Back in the day, I wrote a post on collective learning and quoted two people in my network:

“Every day, I connect and learn from people across the world through social technologies. Some of these people I’ve met in person, increasingly they are people I didn’t know before social media. From them, I glean new insights about topics I set out to learn as well as get introduced to new topics and related information I didn’t realize would help round out what’s important to my life and in my work.” — Marcia Conner

Are you curating smart, knowledgeable networks?

“The way we curate our connections shapes our networks in ways that affect their health and effectiveness.” — Gideon Rosenblatt

I recalled Paul Simbeck-Hampson‘s tips when asked: how do you enhance serendipity in person – face to face and remotely in diverse third places and spaces? He tweeted: 

“F2F or remote; it’s the same:
1. Care.
2. Listen carefully.
3. Ask questions – lots of questions, too many questions!
4. Listen even more carefully.
5. Care even more.”

There is also some great advice from Luis Suarez to make it work best for each of us. Thanks to Marcia Conner for putting a spotlight on Luis Linkedin post. As I am engaged in a few global communities, I connected and followed up privately with a few members I met, discussed, and learned.

I got moving with my fitness.

The 8th March was also International Women Day. I am so grateful to the women in my network. They inspire me. The women who keep exploring and learning, being supportive, impactful, thoughtful, helpful and respectful, along with my learning and work shifts.

I also watched the documentary from Yann Artus-Bertrand called ‘Woman‘, which is beautiful and powerful I think.

I had a great conversation with Trish Wilson, network catalyst from the Network Of Us. It always a treat to connect and explore shared interests: community building and management, network weaving, personal and collective learning, content analysis, deep work and co-creation, the ways we bond and work together, change management, critical thinking.

Within the 21st Century Explorers community, we have weekly collective art experience over video calls. It always fun, deep and mesmerizing to see, feel and hear the beauty and depth of fellow explorers through their pieces of arts and personal stories they curated and created.

A few weeks ago, I hosted a one-hour session where I shared about my artistry, visual thinking, and how I am a flâneur while learning the flow of life and work. Art keeps inspiring me to see patterns, weaving ideas and create resources and knowledge artefacts over time, such as my blog posts and my upcoming book on connectedness and continuous learning through life and work.

I also attended a webinar on the client’s relationship with Trusted Advisor Associates.

Helen Blunden improves her French writing. After reading her working and learning out loud blog post in French: Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait cette semaine?’, I share my suggestions as French is my mother tongue.

“Learning to write French requires practice and lots of feedback. By doing writing a blog post in French and then seeking feedback from my French speaking network, I’m able to correct the written phrases.

Here’s what I got up to this week.

A BIG Merci to Rotana Ty (@rotanarotana) for this weeks corrections!”

Helen tweeted:

“Big thank you to @rotanarotana for helping me with the French blog writing this week! It’s been fun to have my French speaking personal learning network helping me out.”

We also had a great private asynchronous chat the next few days. So rare these days but so good. You may be interested in Helen’s take on working and learning out loud:

Working out loud for me means…

  • I need to feel as if I’m an OBSERVER to their thinking process – not their student. I don’t want to be lectured to or told I need to do things in certain ways ONLY, I want them to ENCOURAGE my creativity – not to stifle it.
  • I need to feel as if I’m the GUIDE to changing my own process – not them. That is, they give me the confidence to experiment and do another or new way to what they’ve shown me because this makes learning novel and new – hence more memorable and it sticks for me.
  • I need to then SHARE what I learned to others to observe me (the cycle repeats).

So working out loud, if I can change the perspective here, is as much about the person doing it AS IT IS for the observer watching them.

The day I keep participating in the #PKMastery workshop with a global cohort and Harold Jarche. What is different this time? I connect with one participant at a time through the platform we use and social media. I met a few folks through the PBCC community who take or re-do the workshop. The duration is shorter. First time: sixty days. Now: forty days. Good.

My learning flow is slightly different. In 2020, I used a combination of tools to capture what I read and do with each activity and resource published every Monday and Thursday. On Google Keep and my desktop folders. Findable. Easy.

I also turned assignments into tasks with Clickup. Finally, I anchored what I did and learned through a blog post and a series.

So this year my toolkit and resources are a combination of:

  • Email to get the content of the activity posted every other day of the workweek. The mail I got is turned into a task with Clickup. Easy to read or retrieve content from the workshop. When one activity is done, and the resources dug, the mail is deleted.
  • Slack/Google Docs/Keep/Word to capture what I read and see, write down my thoughts and questions. Easy to use formatting to put words in bold, italic, add links, visuals to create threads. Searchable and retrievable archive.
  • Clickup to track my assignments and sub-tasks with deadlines and status per task. This is how I am self-disciplined and regulate to work on the PKM discipline.
  • Cloud archive. I created documents in 2020. Notes. Resources. Visuals. I revisit with fresh eyes what I captured, wrote, sketched, drew, produced.
  • Pen and paper to produce diagrams and for network mapping.
  • Blogging to share my observations, thoughts and sensemaking.
  • Fellow seekers. I have already posted on the platform questions, thoughts and resources with the other participants. The resources are also other participants worldwide, and Harold is available when needed for an audio or video call.

I dug resources related to community management: newsletter from Rosieland, blog posts by Feverbee, videos, TheCR Library and podcast. Then, I turned a few actionable insights into a digest to retrieve and use when relevant.

I have continued my future skills research. Here is below my attempt to synthesize what caught my attention so far.

future skills mapping work learning research rotana ty visual thinking diagram

I reviewed and edited my old blog posts: focusing, modern professional learner, the neo-generalist.

We have had many asynchronous chats in the global communities I belong to. The topics vary. From critical thinking and creativity to making our craft. From using workplace learning models to building and engaging a community of practice remotely.

I wrote a Linkedin recommendation to Paul Simbeck-Hampson for his continuous support and worked with personal brand transformation.

I kept reading and using the book ‘Real Learning‘ by Jay Cross. My participation in the PKM Workshop carried on as well as follow-ups with people in my network.

It was time to make some spring cleaning: books donation, shoes donation.

I enjoyed watching the psychological science fiction film ‘Ad Astra‘ on space exploration, the unknown and the relationship between a father and a son.

Working with a professional editor on my forthcoming book about connectedness and continuous learning has been a real pleasure. Improving grammar to make sentences flow better and adding great ideas to stretch, improve and strengthen my writing. The additions bring more depth, breadth and strength to my voice, deep thoughts and feelings. I really love how this book is coming together. The next steps are formatting the book, working on the cover and self-publishing.

I have heard who has reached out to me this week via email/media tools or on social to get to know me better and to see if it is relevant for us to connect and explore the possibilities – or not.

My social sharing continued through tweets, reposts on LinkedIn, my blog posts and an article on neo-generalists by Kenneth Mikkelsen. In between my days, work and study, I often had tea, listened to music and went for walks. Slack, Google Docs, Keep, my moleskine and WordPress are still my go-to places to jot down drafts of emerging thoughts.

It felt good to reconnect with a few people in my entourage to check in and catch up.

Next: Activation

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Mentoring.

What does it mean for you ?

How do you activate mentoring ?

Why ?

The Mentoring One from The Women Talking about Learning Podcast

RT @marciamarcia RT @tloh: “I don’t have one mentor. My network mentors me. Reid Hoffman, as quoted in Forbes magazine” via @lehawes

What does an uplifting learner’s relationship/experience look like?

I heard one of my network nodes in the podcast ‘The Women of Learning‘, Taruna Goël, in conversation with André Watts discussing mentoring.

The Mentoring One – Podcast Notes

So here are my messy notes:

Mentoring is any relationship between an experienced person and a newbie. Experience and wisdom on an approach or life skills. Tools, tips and tricks as I had the adventure—the experience inside or outside the workplace.

Formal or informal mentoring. Use storytelling to mentor people. There is an interplay between coaching and mentoring. Transform beyond goals.

Ask questions, help people to reflect, to be self-directed learners.

What can I learn from my experience?

It is a learning relationship that ebbs and flows. Use metaphors, words and images to mentor.

Mentoring is about co-creating, teaching, and mutuality. The Sum of mentees makes you richer. I received more than I gave.

“Pass on what you have learned.” — Yoda.

Give of yourself. Make a difference. Empower.

Give more confidence. Long-term goal setting for mentoring. Many mentors.

Personal development and holistic. Flexible approach: short-term or long-term.

Coaching is goals and task-oriented in a short time. It is about skills development.

The structured process:

1. Get to know. Do trust-building. Find common ground.
2. Set a direction: goals, commitment, learning contract.
3. Strengthen the ties. Hear, ask, review and get and give feedback.

It is a fluid structured process.

A mentor is a sounding board or mirror of your thoughts. Stay committed but make it self-directed for a coachee.

On Linkedin, Mastodon, Twitter and global communities of practice, you can find mentors.

Consider reverse mentoring, especially with people younger than yourself. It is about your experience, not your age. The focus is on strength building.

Mentoring & Connected Coaching

This podcast episode with Taruna and my notes make me resurface an insight from an oldie on business education for all:

“But I think the real opportunity for self-driven learning is in the ‘C’ bit of MOOC, ‘c’ for conversation and connecting as well as courses.

It is also in the ‘M’ bit. My vision is for Mentored Open Online Conversations supported by mentors, coaches, facilitators and — most importantly — each other.

“This is why I think that social network technologies are so full of possibility for Mentored Open Online Conversations — it is a practical, timely, socially-engaging, supportive, reassuring and challenging way to learn.

And it is all possible.Anne Marie Rattray

Connected Coaching

Onwards to connected mentoring and connected coaching.

“Unlike courses, workshops, or conferences, coaching is completely focused on your needs. Particular areas of focus are any of the various topics discussed here, such as:

  • Networked management & leadership

  • Nurturing a learning organization

  • Finding communities of practice

  • Knowledge networks

  • Personal knowledge mastery

  • Social learning strategy” – @hjarche

I still believe that coaching is an activity that humans can do, mostly. I wonder if it can be done by humans and machines, though.

I discovered lately via the startup’s Station F ecosystem that there is now an HRTech platform for coaching executives: The Place to Coach. It combines ‘algorithms and humanity’. The platform intend to help you find the right certified coach to develop your leadership and be connected to your purpose as an executive of a large corporation, a business school or a public institution.

I still believe that coaching is a human-centred activity and will still be with using machines for doing so.

How do we become leaders of ourselves to lead a project or an organisation?

How do we take responsibility or ownership of that?

How do we move from command and control, to obedience, and encouraging and supporting people in their work and learning journey?

How do we foster a culture of continuous peer feedback, iterations and improvements?

Mentoring & Future Skills

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A brave new era: what does it look like?

“The 21st century — and many things we have been expecting for the near future — suddenly hit us with a vengeance in 2020. Now we need to connect, adapt, and find our new normal. Perpetual Beta 2020 is another beginning.” wrote Harold Jarche in perpetual beta 2020.

So what may our new normal look like? How can we build a better future now?

That’s what Harold Jarche explores in his latest book, published in the Summer of 2020.

I participated in his community of practice, ‘Perpetual Beta Coffee Club‘, completed his workshop ‘Personal Knowledge Mastery‘ in 2020, participated in the workshop again in March 2021, and kept reading his blog.

I understand the value of communities as I am engaged in a few global ones, and when I read Harold Jarche’s words:

“Communities play a significant role in how we relate to others and perceive ourselves. Communities are more than social networks. Communities of practice,  which are often shorter-term, can provide the connective space between longer-term loose social networks and often temporary work teams. Communities are connectors. 

They are essential. We all need an inner circle to support our learning and make sense of our experiences.

With that in mind and practice, the new normal may be connected to the Renaissance, as Jarche observes:

“Our current era has certain similarities to the European Renaissance of the 14th to 17th centuries. The Renaissance brought wonderful new discoveries — universities, astronomy, print — as well as new challenges — the pox, war, mass slavery . Our age is bringing similar discoveries — nano materials, gene therapy, artificial intelligence — and new threats — Covid-19, extremism, climate change. Today, we are in desperate need of diverse thinking.”

To do so, Harold suggests taking control of our modern professional development approach:

To see the frontiers of our knowledge, we need time to interact, converse, reflect, and experiment. Doing so in a conscious way can help us master the fourth industrial revolution. We are each responsible for our learning. As the authors of The Age of Discovery say — “Don’t just get an education. Make one”.

In other words, learning is crucial as we navigate through the new era:

“Learning is the key to facing our current and future technological, environmental, and societal changes. Developing these new skills requires learning that is rather different from existing training and education systems. This is learning that is informal, requiring significant amounts of implicit knowledge, as well as social sensemaking.

Critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills are not developed in a vacuum. These are permanent social skills.

For example, the discipline of personal knowledge mastery is a unified framework of individually-constructed enabling processes for sensemaking in complexity. PKM is staying afloat in a sea of information buoyed by knowledge networks and guided by communities of practice. It is the number one skill set to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively, and contribute to society. The PKM framework — Seek > Sense > Share — enables professionals to become knowledge catalysts.”

We learn to make sense, add value and innovate.

What the heck is innovation? Jarche writes:

“Innovation today is people making connections. Innovation is dependent on learning in networks. Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing.

Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no fixed plan, structure, or direct feedback. Through social learning we can co-develop emergent practices. Social learning is how we move from transactions to relationships and foster knowledge mobilization.

Innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning. Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about connecting and nurturing ideas. Innovation specialist Tim Kastelle says that, “Innovation is the process of idea management.

At the heart of innovation lies social learning. Harold reminds us about that:

“Social learning, developed through many conversations, enables this flow of implicit knowledge. This is not ‘nonsense chat’, as traditional management might view it, but is essential for creating stronger bonds in professional social networks. Companies have to foster richer and deeper connections which can only be built over time through meaningful conversations.”

Innovation is about embracing, using flows, having a pause and reflecting. That’s what Harold notices:

“Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those innovative ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness.”

In a hyperconnected world, I can understand the value of reflection through this blog.

I navigate the knowledge flows at my own pace, with my network and within communities of practice. The value of social networks relies on us, as Harold underlines:

“Each of us must engage with others and develop our trusted knowledge networks. None of us are smart enough to handle all the connections in our digital lives on our own. We need to use both our human networks and our machines in concert.

Our professional connections, especially those outside our current workplaces, are our security. They will help us learn, find work, and push our professional boundaries. In the long run, the more we contribute to our social networks and communities of practice, the more resilient we will make them and in return will weave a stronger social safety net for ourselves.

Jarche finally writes at the end of his insightful and practical book:

“Our future is not in our tribes, institutions, or markets, even though each will continue to have a role in a networked society. Our future is in a connected, egalitarian global community. It is more than a social justice movement for a marginalized group.

Our new normal has to be inclusive and cooperative. We start by connecting and learning and never stopping. This is perpetual beta — always willing to learn more and to change our minds.

As we have entered another year of the pandemic, it is a book I will revisit over time while going through it and figuring out what the new normal/next normal is.

Next: Personal Knowledge Mastery Series.

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Tapestry Book: deep work and inside out.

Inspirations From Writers

Fascinating ways to read, write, research, highlight, retrieve, pick, proofread, find a balance between productivity and presence, use tech hacks online and offline – as a writer—for example, and reader.

For example, I tuned in to the conversation between Tim Ferris and Maria Popova to listen and take notes to improve my writing over time.

In my archive of highlights, I found some great and helpful writing advice curated by Maria Popova.

“Alongside these edifying essentials, Hemingway offered young Samuelson some concrete writing advice. Advocating for staying with what psychologists now call flow, he begins with the psychological discipline of the writing process (…)”

Other inspiring thoughts from writers and bloggers.

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books & essays & stories & speeches will be about.” — Cory Doctorow

 

“I write all kinds of things, and keep random journals of notes, thoughts, ideas, and bad diagrams. I keep them all for the same reason Austin and others keep theirs. To find what I didn’t know I was looking for. That inspiration. That connected dot. That story I want to tell next.

This is an excellent reminder that we should take time to reflect on what we’ve thought previously, as it might be more applicable to what we’re thinking today than it was when we wrote it down.”Brian Dusablon

 

“(…) Through the magic of the written medium we become privy to the thoughts inside another person’s skull. Neuroscientists consider the brain to be a universe in itself. Writers, in that sense, then become explorers providing a glimpse into a place that is largely unknown.

Good writers, of course, do much, much more than that. They mine their emotions, exhibit deep states of empathy and manage to connect with their readers at more than just one level. A non-fiction book then can answer a pressing, practical question, can offer suggestions that help with real world problems, can educate, inform, amaze and entertain all at the same time. The same list, in reverse, can be applied to great fiction.” — David Amerland

 

“We know that we are ready to share our knowledge when we can explain it simply. This often takes many attempts. Making ideas as simple as possible, but no more, takes time and practice. As French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, commented about a letter he wrote, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

Brevity and clarity are skills to be developed over time.” — @hjarche


Thoughts on ebooks

I examine technology while using McLuhan tetrad. Below is my take on ebooks.

ebook tetrad publishing marketing content creation author visual thinking technology rotana ty

Tapestry Book Project Management

Writing, editing, formatting, and designing my ebook on connectedness and continuous learning take time, discipline, pause and persistence. It is an emotional journey. So check out my creative and productive flow for the Tapestry Book Project Management below.

Tapestry Book Project

Tapestry Book Project. A flowchart produced by Rotana Ty.


Tapestry goes through my flâneur’s journey over 63 pages of my personal learnings, stories and reflections in an ebook format. Through thoughts, experience, practices, inspirations, nudges, and questions, I share my story to work and learn continuously in a networked world.

READ MORE

Transform: a review and notes from the NextGen Enterprise Summit 2020.

This post is a humble review of the event I participated in, and how to share the notes I took to live in my notebook. 

Transform Summit Experience

Thanks to the introduction of Trish Wilson, network catalyst of CICE, I got an invitation from the NextGen Enterprise Summit organisers, which occurred in Paris and remotely via Zoom and Virbela from the 25th to 27th November 2020. I participated. It was quite good and interesting.

“From traditional #management to adaptive and purpose driven organizations. #TheNextGenEnterprise #FutureOfWork #Agile #SelfOrganization@TheNextGenEnte2

 

Virbela Events is a customizable virtual world for online events that revolutionizes the way people host and attend events.”

A whole studio was settled for the summit. Impressive.

On 25th November, the pre-event highlighted the need for organizations to become learning, resilient, and collaborative organizations.

To reinvent themselves and transform like butterflies have done before they become what they are. The transformation is cultural and digital; at the end of the pre-event, awards organisations won on management innovation.

Transform Summit – Next Day

On the next day, the kick-off was refreshing with the video of artists live-streamed on Zoom. The hosts and speakers were on the ground with masks in Paris; the attendees and other speakers were on Zoom. It looks like hybrid events are the way these days.

A button on Zoom for each talk or intervention from the hosts to hear live interpretation in French or English was made by human translators as the speakers talked. Much appreciated!

Klaxoon was also the tool used by everyone attending to share, gather and add ideas through post-its. Kind of a giant brainstorming for collective intelligence.

Which questions or ideas do you have on topics such as the future of work, business design, enterprise network platforms and so on?

Interesting way of doing and learning as the participants were at the same time on Zoom and Virbela.

Miro, Jamboard and Mural are the tools I have seen in other remote conferences where the participants whiteboard together to wire and think visually in real-time on shared interests. Creating resources and collective thinking FTW!

There were also some physical exercises to take care of ourselves between each morning session, especially for the attendees in front of screens. It is important to pause and embrace holistic health with Zoom fatigue, especially with fitness on our terms with Darebee. To be whole as heard during the talks.

There was also a dancing crew and a DJ on the ground. Refreshing and inspiring to ignite some creativity and bring energy beyond the wires with movement and music. 

Another layer of the interactions between the physical and virtual gateways of the conference was through virtual worlds.

One day before the kick-off, the participants were invited to create their own avatar on Virbela with the face, suit and even the expression we want to share when we walk through virtual places of the event.

Transform Summit – VR Experience

After the opening of the event, we walked through the virtual world to head towards the auditorium. The intent was to meet and discuss with a small group of other attendees through Virbela as the microphone could be activated while muted on Zoom.

Unfortunately, being close to other participants while sitting in a virtual chair or standing in the virtual auditorium did not trigger right away to connect and discuss with other people. I heard other people who were talking on the VR platform as well on Zoom. It was a Babel tower.

Finally, the Zoom session host created breakout rooms automatically to introduce ourselves and discuss with our small group of four attendees around our interest in the Next-Gen Enterprise Summit and questions we had.

As I am interested in the business design/organizational development space, it is clear that distributed work, new ways of operating and learning are music to my ears, from the need of community, wirearchy and hybrid work. All those topics caught my attention in the context of the pandemic.

Transform Remote Workshop ‘Taking Change to the Next Level’

On 26th November, I participated in the remote workshop on taking change to the next level. As put on the website:

“Next Gen Entreprise: Taking change to the next level

Speakers: Eliana Hohl, Sabrina Bouraoui, Anne-Claire Berg

Description: Imagine you ignore the notifications that your smartphone keeps sending you about updating your mobile’s operating system. It would be a mess, right?

The exact same principle applies to your organization. Yet, reality shows that most companies ignore or don’t even see these signals. How come?

While the call for change has grown, the way that change is actually achieved has not. Let’s explore the differences between change and transformation, training & inner development together.

Be ready to walk away from this session with a new framework for better understanding and approaching transformational change and its complexity.”

Thanks to Trish Wilson again, I met Sabrina Bouraoui, one of the hosts, through a private conversation over Zoom with the CICE network months ago. So I was curious and excited to join the event. It was useful and great.

The first part of the workshop was to reflect on how it takes time, practice, efforts and patience to rewrite our physical and cognitive routines. The intent was to be aware of our bias, our automated pilot mode when we want to grow, unlearn to learn. Our learning curve can be a rollercoaster with the wave of confidence at the beginning of our ride, then drop until we reach the deep realm of complex problems and finally resurface to thrive. 

As heard during this workshop, no pain, no brain gain, feel the burn. Unlearning old practices to learn new ones is tough. One of my takeaways from the workshop is that learning is about sensemaking, connecting the dots and embodiment. What does it take to embrace personal transformation versus to have a constant desire to optimize everything?

Non-linear change takes a combination of doing, listening and co-creating, as referenced during this event with Otto Scharmer’s work.

How can we deepen our whole person? Experimenting together, co-creating and creating resonance. All combined. At the sweet spot is unpredictability. 

A major change and strong emotions can be blockers or enablers for our sustainable development.

How do we notice our head, heart and hands? And gut? What hinders us from growing?

Well, that was the question we had to discuss in a breakout room of three participants. 

I realized that the disciplines I focus on might be my blindspots for any conversation, project or action I take to learn and grow. So, after the small circles, we were back all together with the participants of the workshop. Unfortunately, few of them were invited to share the thread of their discussion with everyone.

Then came the intervention of Anne-Claire Berg, Danone Culture and Engagement. She said:

“Cells, teams of teams, make an organization.”

People, our planet and health are interconnected. 

She raised the question:

“What is my (yearly) routine to make the/my system better?”

Based on her experience and work at Danone, she inspired us with elements we can foster to give voices to people, bring a platform to share knowledge, discuss and shape a business culture and strategy.

The workshop wrapped up with insight from Sabrina Bouraoui.

“Transformation is not about formation.” 

Formation is a French word that means training. Going beyond training enables us to dig deep into our emotions, trust and notice them be the next-gen enterprise. But it has to start with our individual transformation with the work on the head, heart and hand.

How do we develop people instead of training them only in the context of the pandemic and beyond? Transformation starts with(in) ourselves.

Morphology of Next-Gen Enterprise

On day two of the conference, I joined a Zoom session in the morning with Isabelle Kocher, former CEO of Engie Group. 

“She spoke about the future of capitalism in Europe, the new forms of governance and this double materiality which characterizes European culture. #thenextgenenterprise” @bretones

Her take on the morphology and vitality of organizations is interesting. 

Turn your big key into small ones.

Leaders are the small keys/purposes. But, it has to start with going outside, at the edges, to identify what is happening with your ecosystem.

What is missing? What is vital? What is your thinking and doing when you have a purpose-driven by design?

This health, economic and societal crisis brought by the pandemic enables us to be aware of our limits of reacting. What is happening with the pandemic could happen on a wider scale with the nine planetary boundaries that the Stockholm Resilience Center researches.

Rethinking the way we consume, travel, work and learn in the long term instead of thinking about obsolescence. 

Transform – Big Question

What do the new work and organization look like in the context of the pandemic and beyond? 

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Community Building.

The Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop is the crème de la crème of remote, self-directed, and peer-learning experiences that I have enjoyed. Big shout out to Harold Jarche. In this series of blog posts, you can dive deep into the activities and reflections I have done and review them over time.

How do you develop your personal knowledge mastery?

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

“Creativity is a mindset, an attitude, a way of life. It could also be seen as a set of habits. If you want to bring your creativity to the fore, then explore ways of bringing it into your life in myriad small acts” — Meredith Lewis

“Creativity, Leski tells us, is a path with no beginning or end; it is ongoing. This revelatory view of the creative process will be an essential guide for anyone engaged in creative discovery.” — MIT Press, The Storm of Creativity by Kyna Leski with a foreword by John Maeda

“The four pillars of creativity:

• Inspiration = read books, seek interesting conversations, learn from others and nature
• Ideation = generate and discuss ideas
• Introspection = reflect on your progress, feelings, challenges and opportunities
• Idleness = rest, relax, recharge” — @anthilemoon

“Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.” — @TharpTwyla, The Creative Habit

Through this series of blog posts on creativity, I share how one can nurture and develop creativity on their own and with people. Enjoy.

Did you enjoy the post? Check out the Tapestry Book.

Rachel Happe

“Great list of resources to explore the future of learning/future of work.”

This is the feedback I got after I tweeted this blog post with Rachel. Indeed it is about developing ourselves to engage ourselves and people worldwide from our local city. Building a relationship and using technology makes that possible.

Whether we use asynchronous or synchronous ways, it is about just doing it. Over time, we can better develop people in any team, network, organization, or community – in person and remotely, methinks. Rachel Happe, the founder of Engaged Organizations, underlines that:

Communities are, at their core, the way people have always come together to learn. They provide the space, relationships, collisions, and trust necessary to create shared meaning, to iterate on emergent ideas, and to norm new patterns and behaviours.” 

It matters more than ever in an uncertain, complex, and changing world. Communities, especially communities of practice and learning communities, give us a safe, trusted space to experiment and make sense as we feel seen and heard. I have joined a few global communities in which I participate.

Perpetual Beta Coffee Club

After I completed the remote workshop ‘Personal Knowledge Mastery ‘, I was invited by Harold to join and participate via Slack in the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club, the global community of practice focused on workplace learning and distributed work:

“Members are from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, & USA.

We have a private discussion forum and I host live web video chats monthly. Dates and times are arranged by a monthly poll of members. These are recorded and available for a week afterwards. We try to ensure that what is discussed inside the coffee club stays there. It is intended to be a trusted space. As the club grows, I will offer more services to meet demand.

While the main focus is workplace learning, we talk about whatever interests our members — books, democracy, leadership, media, etc.”

Read my #PKMastery Series to learn more about our activities through the Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop and the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club.

Engagement: when time allows via Slack and monthly video calls. Via Mastodon and Linkedin with some members.

The Community Roundtable Academy

I explore the community management space’s latest practices through a few podcasts, a newsletter, blog posts, and online courses from top-notch professionals from the community management space. I am certified because I dived deep into two online courses from The Community Roundtable Academy. Read one more in the Community Series

Engagement: through the academy platform. When time allows.

Networked Intelligence

Through the Explorers Group’s online gatherings (see below), I’ve met the host of the Networked Intelligence (initially CICE Network), Trish Wilson, Global Network Catalyst, Founder and Director, based in Auckland, New Zealand. Check out the website to discover more what Networked Intelligence is all about:

“INQ | Dot Connecting

INQ | Improvement Networked Intelligence

About dot connecting!

Putting the Global Improvement Band together.

It’s Global & Local, Present & Future, and 100% People focused!

Stay tuned for more.

Engagement: when time allows. Though recurrent online live and asynchronous gatherings hosted by Trish.

Explorers

Klara Loots host the weekly gathering via Zoom and WhatsApp on self-development, creativity and learning. Members are on several continents and countries: South Africa, the UK, New Zealand and France. One theme, one activity live and asynchronous when a slot emerges collectively.

Read my exploratory series to discover more about the ways and activate my exploration on my own and with fellow explorers.

Engagement: dormant.

Urgent Optimists

Before I share more about this community, let me share a few words about the Foresight Essentials Community. I am certified after completing and participating in the online courses Ready, Set, Future! Introduction to Futures Thinking and Life After COVID-19: Get Ready for our Post-Pandemic Future, which Jane McGonigal brings from the Institute For The Future. They are both pretty good starting points for anyone interested in foresight essentials. Read more in my blog post on this topic.

I am an alumnus of this foresight community of IFTF Certified Practitioners. It was active through frequent meetups, webinars, a newsletter and if we want to further specializations via other online courses via Coursera. Read my futures thinking series to learn more about the emergent practices and mindset I have learned and used.

Now few thoughts on the Urgent Optimists Community.

Urgent Optimists is Institute for the Future’s first individual membership program. We’re bringing together people who want to feel authentically hopeful about the Future, and who are working to create positive transformation in society and their own lives.

A global community of practice on Mighty Networks hosted by Jane McGonigal, research director at IFTF. Joined in February 2022 and a founding member of the Urgent Optimists Community. Consider joining us to develop your imagination, deep collaboration and creativity.

Engagement: dormant.

Examining Global Communities

Below are visuals I created to examine the impacts of global online communities.

tetrad social media community connectedness analysis visual thinking rotana ty

Visual produced by Rotana Ty

community learning practice change shift communication tetrad rotana ty

Visual produced by Rotana Ty

small community management learning experience social interactions visual thinking rotana ty

Visual produced by Rotana Ty

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organization’s ecosystem.

LEARN MORE

Strengths Building Coaching

This is Summertime. After being involved intensively over the past few months in co-creating and enacting a learning community and program specialised in soft skills, I review, refine and recalibrate through my strengths and self-knowledge.

“The ability to change your mind is proof you are capable of learning.” — @ValaAfshar

I am grateful for life and serendipitous encounters while engaging in one learning community/community of practice at a time. For example, last week, I met over the 21st Century Explorers Community and conversed with Lotte Koënig, Clifton Strengths certified coach from Gallup. I was so glad to meet her as I had done by the end of last year’s self-assessment.

I’ve got a personal report of my thirty-four themes strengths. I lead with strategic thinking and constantly absorb and analyse information that informs better decisions. I stretch thinking for nowness and future.

I have revisited my personalised and unique report in quiet times on my own. We have done so with Lotte for a few sessions to dive deep and reflect on my strengths. As a result, I have captured a few actionable insights to move forward and self-improve in this visual.

Did you enjoy the post? Check out the Tapestry Book.

Introducing my Uplifting & Insightful Blogroll

Dive into this curated collection of insightful bloggers who will inspire and make you rethink the ways and which you learn and work. From personal growth to business adventures, these bloggers share their unique perspectives, offering a refreshing take on work/learning experiences.

Expand your horizons and embark on a journey of actionable insights with my handpicked selection of bloggers. Enjoy!

According to Lilia Efimova (@mathemagenic), a blog can serve as a boundary object that connects various knowledge domains and social networks due to the author’s diverse range of themes, roles and identities.

Over time, I have followed a diverse range of blogs within both my local and global networks, which have consistently stimulated, nourished, and fueled my creative ideas, enhanced my ways of learning, and positively influenced my professional approach. These uplifting, insightful, and thought-provoking blogs have significantly enriched my professional journey.

Explore each blog and blogger below by continent or multiple continents.

Uplifting & Insightful Thoughts on Writing & Printing

I highly recommend two podcast episodes to hear.

The Tim Ferriss Show #460: Writing, Workflow, and Workarounds

Fascinating techniques for improving reading, writing, researching, highlighting, retrieving, selecting, proofreading, and balancing productivity with presence, using technology hacks both online and offline – as both a writer and reader.

DyeSubCast Episode 9


Even though I have never had the opportunity to meet Michael Josefowicz face to face, I can sense his kind-hearted nature from our past interactions through Twitter Tennis and remote collaboration on a print and transmedia project a few years ago. His knowledge and expertise in the Printernet world are truly remarkable. Thanks to the Universe for its clear communication abilities.

Here are some notes I took while listening to this discussion:

Paper-based media is the most effective for meaningful conversation. It is the result of reflecting on the paper with a pencil, highlighting text, setting it aside, and revisiting it later, transforming it from nothing to something of greater value with ink and prints. Experiments in content creation.

Printernet establishes a foundation for dialogue. For businesses in your region, profitable publication and consistent bulletins are essential. Print everything feasible to distribute in your print stores. Cultivate your image to develop a state-of-the-art facility with the ideal audience. To achieve success, you need one thing: control over your story. Enhance it with a compelling image. Utilize Google Docs for seamless editing, then convert to PDF.

Engage in PrintChat, a Twitter chat that allows you to connect with others in the industry. Attend events such as cocktail parties to network and refine your skills. But remember, practice is key.

  1. Speak only when necessary.
  2. Listen attentively and observe personalities, tweets, and the interactions of individuals.
  3. Practice answering questions concisely with clarity. Use Twitter’s 240 character limit.

Uplifting & Insightful Tapestry Book

Here are another inspiring thoughts:

“Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.” — Cory Doctorow

I experience this.

Tapestry Book: the deep work behind the scenes is my learning journey through the process of transforming blog posts into a cohesive and unique e-book. It unravels the trials and tribulations of connecting my scattered thoughts and ideas, weaving them together into a rich tapestry of knowledge, experience and artfefacts.

From the initial spark of inspiration to the final polished artefact, this e-book takes you on a behind-the-scenes adventure, revealing the intricate work required to craft a compelling narrative.

blogroll blogging blog network sensemaking park marseille

This is a photo I took while walking in a park in Marseille, France.

Did you enjoy this post? Check out the Tapestry Book.

Wrapping up the PKM Workshop

After 60 days, the remote workshop ‘Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM), which started on 13th January 2020, will close on 20th March.

I enjoyed the learning experience very much, which was brought by Harold Jarche. It does help me make sense of what I have learned and developed over the past few years and months to assess and refine skills and habits I need to strengthen, develop and practise.

Becoming a Knowledge Catalyst

Below is the ultimate purpose of the workshop, as shared on the page of the workshop.

leaders as catalysts

Reviewing Activities

On the page for the workshop, it is written:

“Comments and reflections are all done via the website as threaded discussions, so there are no specific dates or times to attend. Harold Jarche provides coaching, advice, feedback, and other resources as needed. Harold is also available via audio or video conference. Discussion is encouraged so that people can learn from each other. For participants, the more they give, the more they get.”

I appreciate these ways of doing and learning on my own with Harold and other workshop participants.

I have copied the workshop outline from the page to put it in bold and with a more critical heading. That way, I can share each item’s thoughts and links to some of my blog posts one topic/activity/day at a time. Some of them were shared with Harold and the participants in our private online space during the workshop.

Networks, Communities & Teams


Mapping Networks

Well, I enjoyed doing this first activity:

One of the first critical learnings from this workshop is on networks. We were asked:

“Network-centric questions would be, “What are you learning?” or “Who are you learning from?”. For example Twitter asks, “What’s happening?”.

By mapping visually my network, I understand better as I tweeted:

“Visualization gives us a chance to ask ourselves questions about our knowledge-sharing, cooperation and collaboration practices.” < using kumu.io helps me to map my network and to do so #PKMastery” 

The next step is to analyse my network with the basics of social network analysis. In the second key learning of this workshop, we learn about communities, especially communities of practice. This part on communities also enables me to revisit my Twitter usage as insights, questions and resources to dive into. As I tweeted:

Who is connected to who? What are they talking about? Can I jump into the conversation even if we don’t know each other? https://rotanaty.com/2015/10/03/learning-journey #PKMastery

 

“Twitter is also for me a place where it clearly pays off to be generous: The more you share what others have done, the more they share your work and the more people get involved.” — @patrikbergman #PKMastery


Finding Communities

I have joined a few global communities in which I participate actively. Check out more in this blog post about global communities.

Narration of Work

“Narrating your work does not require polished essays, but rather the routine sharing of thoughts that over time may reveal some insights.” – Harold Jarche in the PKM Remote Workshop

I share how I seek, sense, and share thoughts and experiences over time in this blog post.

Seek > Sense > Share


Filters

Platforms

Adding Value

This is how I create a network filter, use platforms, and add value to my learning journey.

Critical Thinking


Understanding Media

“My experience with these tetrads is that the more you do, the better you get.” – Harold Jarche

Here are a few tetrads I created to examine some technologies:

Shift to communities and random collisions.

Workplace futures.

Effects of video and effects of audio.

Tentative Opinions

Well, I try to do so by asking questions about the future of the learning profession:

Which skillsets and disciplines do learning professionals need to develop and hone to stay relevant?

Personal Knowledge MasteryFutures ThinkingCommunity ManagementCoaching? Learning Design?

Evaluate

Challenging someone’s else idea by writing a private counter post on it with references and links as needed. It is an action to be done for me when time allows.

Here is a valuable resource shared during the workshop by Harold Jarche. I look forward to revisiting and using it over time:

“Active listening is a valuable technique that requires the listener to thoroughly absorb, understand, respond, and retain what is being said. To hone your active listening, learn more about our 6 key skills.

The active listening skillset involves these 6 active listening skills:

Paying attention,
Withholding judgment,
Reflecting,
Clarifying,
Summarizing, and
Sharing.” – Center for Creative Leadership

People



Experts

Connectors

Seekers & Catalysts

“Being a knowledge catalyst means taking the time to add value to your knowledge. One way is to simplify what you know. Make your work human understandable. Speak in non-geek terms. If experts do not do this they will become surrounded by less informed people over time. Our global human networks will get dumber. These networks of people might even vote for bombastic populists or support policies that will make all of us poorer or less free to pursue our goals.

The way out of this mess is to make our social networks, and our society, smarter. Leadership today is helping our networks make better decisions.”

PKM Roles

Source: https://jarche.com/2017/05/the-world-needs-knowledge-catalysts

I have used this map to see where I am and where to go.

I may be considered an expert: low sharing, high sensemaking. But, I want to go: high sharing, high sensemaking – to become a catalyst.

Curating



Topics

Comparing

Creating Content

I use Seek > Sense > Share, as detailed in this post.

Establishing Your Practice


PKM in Action

“Think about one primary practice that you think you could do for each: Seek > Sense > Share. Please share these with other participants.” – Harold Jarche


Seeking

This is what I do to nurture my curiosity. Like Patrik Bergman, I use daily Feedly and Twitter to go with the knowledge flows, among other ways, such as podcasts and videos.

Sensemaking

I have mapped my routines—still a work in progress.

Like Karen Jeannette, I try to create value through a few mindmaps / visual synthesis / sketchnotes, presentations, and blogging – I still struggle to do so frequently and with added value.

Last year, I shared my weekly findings through my’ learning newsletter‘ like your Friday’s Finds, Harold. I need to stop doing so. Instead, I intend to search on my blog per keyword, tag or category when required, whether for a project, research or a new blog post.

For instance, like yourself, I have noticed that distributed learning and work, not only remote work, are the topics du jour in the context of the global health crisis. So I will go through my cornucopia/blog posts and what I have shared on those topics.

Sharing

In that same blog post, I shared my habits. The key to learning from this workshop is discernment, “or knowing when and with whom to share.” as you shared in the previous post 15. Content Creation.

Based on a conversation in person and online with people, I may follow up by sharing on one social channel, email, or blog post. Sometimes, I also don’t do any sharing. However, when time allows, I may do so later after conversations and actions.

Reflecting

Using the PKM Quest resource, which Harold shared in the workshop. I am identifying people to help me in my quest. Who is my PKM crew? I must work on those activities as I could not do them during the workshop.

The Next Steps

“In 2011 @iftf identified 10 #futureofwork skills for 2020. Well, it’s 2020 and these are what’s needed now http://iftf.org/futureworkskills #PKMastery” – @hjarche

Image

Harold suggested at the end of this workshop to examine the four competencies/core work future skills identified by @iftf and that we have developed over the 60-day PKM remote workshop:

1. Sensemaking
2. Social intelligence
3. New media literacy
4. Cognitive load management

It is also about seeing what I think I should improve and writing down my next PKM journey. Harold recommended we review it in six months. This is what I share with him and the participants of the workshop:

Thank you, Harold, for sharing your experience, knowledge and this workshop. Grateful. Very much appreciated! 

As I examine the four competencies, I should improve my new media literacy, especially critical thinking skills and cognitive load management. 

My next steps on my PKM journey are: to read and use some resources I have bookmarked, to revisit and review my notes and visuals from the workshops as well as my blog posts on PKM, to dive into few online courses that were suggested in the workshop, to assess my practices and routines, do some suggested activities I could not do during this workshop. Last but not least, to blog about my experience with the PKM workshop in the upcoming days. 

Looking forward to connecting with other participants via social media and to the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club. :)

Au plaisir,

Rotana


How I Navigate the Remote Workshop

According to my time tracking tool Toggl combined with the productivity platform Clickup, I have spent 3 to 4 hours per week going deep to learn and practise during the 60-day PKM remote workshop.

How did I go with the flow of resources and activities?

Here are some habits and practices I did and have over time:

Turning activities and hyperlinks from the workshop into prioritised, planned and unplanned tasks via Clickup.

I am using Keep to capture some highlights from the workshop’s contents and take personal notes.

Using stocks and flows 

I have turned my Google Keep notes into Google Docs. That way, I can retrieve and revisit over time into a folder per topic/activity/day I went through the remote workshop. My folder includes documents, visuals, or any format I have created or captured per topic/activity. Or I can search for anything in the search box. :-)

Commenting in the private online space 

For instance, halfway through the workshop, I share those thoughts with Harold and my fellow knowledge seekers / PKMers:

I find it sometimes hard to catch up with the #intro, activities, #tips and comments over weeks. I feel that I had opened a Pandora box when I joined the PKM Workshop. Any tips or suggestions to better go with the flow?

So far, I have taken notes and highlighted what caught my attention on my notetaking app (Google Keep), which can be turned into Google Docs for later reviewing and retrieval.

I have also turned activities into tasks to do one to three of them one week at a time, and share some of my activities, reflections and learnings into blog posts that I have shared for some of them over this private space, and some on Twitter with the hashtag #PKMastery. I also pay attention to the backchannel on Twitter with the hashtag #PKMastery

As we are now halfway, I will step back temporarily from the workshop from this weekend to review my previous notes and what I have done the activities 1 to 18. I intend to see if patterns emerge and synthesize what I have learned so far.

Next week, I will sleep on what I have reflected on, done and shared so far. I will travel. I will dive again into the workshop in early March.

Here is the feedback I’ve got:

“It sounds like you are doing fine, Rotana. Don’t stress about doing all aspects of every activity. You can do them later or save to your notes. Remember that you can always come back here for a refresher workshop. This workshop is like a buffet table — eat what you need.” – Harold Jarche

Sharing a few activities and ideas into public blog posts with the tag’ knowledge mastery‘ and in the backchannel of the remote workshop on Twitter: #PKMastery

Bottom line

The Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop is the crème de la crème of remote, self-directed and peer learning experiences that I have enjoyed. I highly recommend it.

Update

From 1st March until 23rd April 2021, I participated again in the workshop with a new global cohort, as tweeted:

“Participating for the second time in the #PKMastery workshop to revisit, develop and refine my work and learning practices with a global cohort and @hjarche https://twitter.com/hjarche/status/1365337275656200202

Next: Dive into my #PKMastery blog post series.

Did you enjoy the post? Check out Future Skills.

Learning Futures at Learning Technology France Conference 2020.

Learning Futures At #LTFrance 2020

On February 5th and 6th, I spent a few hours at the Learning Technologies France conference for the first time. As an attendee, I went to some conferences: one on workplace learning design, one on the impact of emerging trends on workplace learning, and one on the French learning market.

Over this post, I want to reflect on the event through this retrospective and the learning profession’s futures.

Learning Futures – Taking Notes

As usual, I brought my Moleskine and pen. I took some personal notes and tried to mindmap the keynotes and workshops. I guess it is how I hear better what the speakers say and how I process the ideas that caught my attention.

Then I use the mobile app Camscanner to scan my paper notes to review them when time allows. The drawing is good, but my notes need to be readable, too. That’s why I often end up using Google Drawing, Genial.ly or Canva to draw my network diagrams digitally.

Here is the mindmap from the keynote of David Kelly, Executive Director of @eLearningGuild, about emerging global trends in digital learning. This talk was more about the impact of emerging technologies and workplace learning behaviours than digital learning or training technologies.

mindmap learning technologies work shifts workplace trends rotana ty

Visual produced by Rotana Ty.

“Spent yesterday afternoon walking around Paris. Can we just take a moment to acknowledge how amazing Google Translate is? It’s not just how easy it made navigating the city, reading museum narratives, and talking to people… it’s about how normal it made it all feel.” — @LnDDave

David Kelly also shared his keynote links to his oldie and pressie over here if you want to go deeper.

Learning Futures – Learner Experience Design

Another interesting session was on learning experience design with Thinkovery. The animation of the workshop was pretty fun and well-done by the two women learning designers. It was also wise to give the attendees a handy print to take notes on their approach to the learning experience while they were doing the workshop.

One of my neighbours in the room gave me kindly a print from the vendor as she told me she already knew their way of doing it.

See below my messy handwritten notes on the five key steps/concepts/activities that they suggest to support performance and trigger workers’ engagement to learn.

learning design experience workplace thinkovery rotana ty

Visual by Thinkovery. Handwritten notes by Rotana Ty.

I received a follow-up mail from the vendor after the conference with a more detailed similar infographic in French.

learning design experience workplace thinkovery rotana ty

Visual by Thinkovery.

I find it interesting to keep in mind to have four to seven key activities when we design learning experiences when we are in the workers’ shoes to propel their engagement and performance while working and learning and not to be overloaded cognitively.

Learning Futures – About #LTFrance 2020

It was an exciting event as they were multiple talks and workshops simultaneously on different spaces in the salon, as Kate Graham, Head of content @fosway and Social chair @LT20UK, noted on her vlog post.

It was easy to flock from one room to another one to hear and see what the speakers were talking about and experimenting, even if sometimes the rooms were so crowded.

I also noted from Kate Graham that there are differences between French learning and the UK learning market. I am not interested in vendors, their specialities and suites, LMS, you know. My focus is on learnability, work and innovation practices.

“As it is well known globally, French employment context is very unique. A combination of a rigid legal framework with a traditional academic approach to education which could initially lead to think there is a more passive approach from the learners.

But it would be too simplistic.. the bubbling numbers of creative start ups demonstrate that innovation and technology is far from behind … Could it an other French exception …” — Gaelle Watson

Yep. I have noticed the emergence of a few innovative learning solutions on learning agility or learnability like this one in the French learning market. #LTFrance is also connected to #LT20UK, which happened in London one week after the Paris fair. I have not dug the backchannel on Twitter and Youtube yet. I will do so.

Learning Futures – Learning Profession: Still Relevant?

As I was diving into the remote workshop ‘Personal Knowledge Mastery‘ lately, I also read 2006 thoughts from Harold Jarche. He includes them in an activity that is related to ‘Ideas and Curiosity’.

“On the ‘learning profession’: As a learning professional, it’s time to take a stance. Enabling learning is no longer about disseminating good content.

Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are no more experts, only fellow learners on paths that may cross.

Which skillset and disciplines do learning professionals need to develop and hone to stay relevant? Personal Knowledge Mastery? Futures Thinking? Community Management? Coaching? Mentoring? Learning Design? Well, Harold says more in this Twitter thread I had with him and Helen Blunden and in this blog post from 2019:

“Learning in communities of trusted human relationships will be the main way professionals will keep up.

If I were a young instructional designer today, I would start developing community management and support skills.”

Update: I have attended the 2021 edition of the Learning Technologies conference in the UK and France, which occurred fully online due to the pandemic.

Stay tuned for the share in an upcoming post of my notes and observation from a few sessions I joined and from the backchannel on Twitter with a few learning professionals in my network.

Learning Futures & Rethinking Your Community & Learning Engagement

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

PKM – personal knowledge mastery: what does it look like?

Harold Jarche shares in his blog post:

It is easy to remember Seek > Sense > Share. From there, more detailed representations can be developed, based on experience and reflection, where the core framework is not dependent on me. Over the years, many variations and routines have been developed by others. But the core message remains — seek diverse perspectives, develop personal sensemaking routines, and share where appropriate.

What does Personal Knowledge Mastery look like?

seek sense share routines personal knowledge mastery rotana ty

Photos collage created by Rotana Ty.

How do I seek diverse perspectives?

What I value is exploring and how to navigate the knowledge flows. Over time, I have developed habits to nurture my curiosity and the resources I use to learn and experiment with sense-makers and curators.

How do I develop personal sensemaking routines?

Blogging helps me review experiences such as visiting digital art spots and third places, projects, years like 2020, my learning journey, and learning circles. Using whiteboards and post-its also helped me synthesise research and experience related to future skills development.

Visual synthesis when I review books, add my two cents, and make sense of practices. For instance, on trends and foresight, contributing to society and multidisciplinary. Mind mapping and network mapping.

Drawing a network diagram. I did this to make sense of what I learned from innovation cultures, my experience and my reflection. Creating visuals helps as well. It is how I synthesise my emergent practices to nurture my curiosity. For example, I did this to review the timeline of an agile management program I completed.

Doing sports, especially swimming, biking, and walking, helped me develop my sensemaking routines.

How do I share where appropriate?

I sometimes use Twitter exchanges and tweets, in-person meetings, exploratory calls, offline and online workshops, blogs, communities of practice, and emails. In a nutshell.

visual synthesis pkm personal knowledge mastery innovation learning habits rotana ty

Visual produced by Rotana Ty.


Insightful thoughts on sensemaking

“I usually begin with an open-ended inquiry. I liken this to dipping my ladle into an immense river of knowledge that’s flowing by. If I miss something, it’s not a big deal; important stuff comes by more than once. I extract general pointers and patterns from tributaries.”

“The next phase is processing what I’ve found. What happens is refinement, hypothesis-testing, looking for patterns, mapping, conversation and reflecting on ideas and images that are emerging. I generally do my best synthesis while asleep. I plant an idea or just have concepts floating around in my head; overnight the boys in the back room come up with a new way of looking at things. Among the streams that feed this phase of sense-making are.”

“Eventually, I turn from pulling ideas into pushing them out. I share my take on things in conversations, both in person and in social networks. I post definitive thoughts to my learn stream. That generates feedback that enables me to improve things. It’s a virtuous circle.

For me, this cycle of pull-reflect-push is my contribution to the knowledge commons that is the Web. I believe in karma. I give to the Web and the Web gives back. I always receive more than I give. In an organization, I think this process of seeking out and sharing meaning is a responsibility of enlightened social citizenship…” — Jay Cross in ‘Making Sense of the World, Chief Learning Magazine Officer.

Next: Read more in the #PKMastery Series.

Did you enjoy the post? Check out Future Skills.

“We should find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. #PKMastery is not about being a better digital librarian, or curator, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked society.” — Harold Jarche


Developing Four Core Work Skills

Since 13th January 2020, I participate in the online workshop ‘Personal Knowledge Mastery‘, which Harold Jarche enables. I enjoy it very much as it helps me to develop those skills:

“The discipline of PKM helps to develop four core work skills, identified by the Institute for the Future:

  1. sense-making

  2. social intelligence

  3. new media literacy

  4. cognitive load management”

Image

Source: via a tweet from @hjarche and sketch by @tnvora https://twitter.com/hjarche/status/1211640798267224065

I have joined this workshop as I read recommendations from practitioners in my network:

“The more I am out there chatting to clients, the more I realise that your PKM approach is the number one critical skill set.  Any way I look at it, all roads seem to end there.  It is the foundation.  That’s why I thought this is where they need to start – and not just the employees – everyone including the managers.” — Helen Blunden

And as Harold tweeted:

“When I started working on #PKMastery in 2004 — inspired by @mathemagenic — few people were interested. Now we are implementing the framework and discipline in global organizations. Change takes time” — Harold Jarche


Network Mapping & Networked Learning

One of the first key learning from this workshop is on networks. We were asked:

“Network-centric questions would be, “What are you learning?” or “Who are you learning from?”. For example Twitter asks, “What’s happening?”.

By mapping visually my network, I understand better as I tweeted:

“Visualization gives us a chance to ask ourselves questions about our knowledge-sharing, cooperation and collaboration practices.” < using kumu.io helps me to map my network and to do so #PKMastery” 

Here is what my network looks like below.

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The screenshot I took from my social network analysis. Done via kumu.io

The next step is to analyse my network with the basics of social network analysis. In the second key learning of this workshop, we learn about communities, especially communities of practice. This part of the workshop on communities also enables me to revisit my usage of Twitter as there are insights, questions and resources to dive into. As I tweeted:

Who is connected to who? What are they talking about? Can I jump into the conversation even if we don’t know each other? https://rotanaty.com/2015/10/03/learning-journey #PKMastery

 

“Twitter is also for me a place where it clearly pays off to be generous: The more you share what others have done, the more they share your work and the more people get involved.” — @patrikbergman #PKMastery

Update: Read on more emergent practices and reflection in the #PKMastery series.

Did you enjoy the post? Check out Future Skills.

When I was off to London for a three days exploration of the city. I felt refreshed and re-energized after my travel when I returned early this week. I love walking around the City of London.

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In Kew Garden, London.

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Morning Sunday walk along the Thames, London pier. 

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While heading to the subway, I took the time to shoot this street art fresco in the borough of Shoreditch, London.

This long weekend trip brought me this as I was mulling over my shift.

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms” — Brent Crane

I needed to be self-aware, self-regulated and rewire my brain.

“Whether travelling for business or pleasure travel should always be about discovery. The connections we make as we experience the world beyond ourselves. The knowledge we acquire as we talk to people who are different from us in their experiences and their perceptions. The challenge itself, the way we process it, rewires our brain and leads to a different way of considering where we are and who we are.

A sense of place and identity is key to creating a sense of purpose. Purpose gives meaning to actions.” — David Amerland

I needed to go slow.

“But, in a time when we favor answers over questions, efficiency over precision, another rule we should consider very carefully is the sixth one: “faster is slower” — @tdebaillon

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A photo I shot during a stroll in Greenwich Park, London.

Update: as the pandemic hit in 2020, I examine travelling while using McLuhan tetrad. Below is my take.

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A visual produced by Rotana Ty

Did you enjoy this post? Check out the Tapestry Book.

We have moved from Summertime to Autumn. I am mulling over actions and deep thoughts while revisiting the past and exploring the present and the future. I have been involved in projects related to peer learning since the latest April of this year. It is good to be in the flow with speed and connections of people, ideas and actions.

While revisiting my learning streams on social, I have stepped back and reviewed this gem:

Beautiful & spot on, @tnvora : “Patience is a silent virtue that seems difficult to practice in a world obsessed with speed, connection and noise. Everything happens in an instant, or so it seems.” #slowsocial 🙏 ping @elsua https://twitter.com/rotanarotana/status/1118727081062477824

As I shared in this oldie, it is essential to go slow to go fast and together:

There is something in the nature of #SlowSocial and fast social that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation and meaningful contributions in online conversations, body of knowledge and pattern recognition.

Anyone can be connected to nature and disconnected from the Internet. Call it connectedness to yourself through your senses and heart. Feel, touch, experience.

“Love this, @rotanarotana ! Totally agree it’s about switching on curiosity about self in surroundings. Now let’s take tracking further: how does my physical movement affect the quality of my thinking and decision making? Connecting physical, cognitive and emotional.” ― @changingview

And it takes silence, time and practice to be creative and keep learning:

“Creativity and learning stems from our inner connection, meaningful conversations and mindful consumption that truly feed us internally. Here are Jane Kenyon’s wise words to live by via @brainpicker https://qaspire.com/2018/01/31/creativity-jenny-kenyons-wise-words-to-live-by” 

To do what? To develop yourself to engage yourself and other people to develop better people in any team, network, organisation, community – in person and remotely as shared with Paul Jocelyn over his tweet on learning:

“Learning, on the other hand, is self-directed. Learning isn’t about changing our grade, it’s about changing the way we see the world. Learning is voluntary. Learning is always available, and it compounds, because once we’ve acquired it, we can use it again and again.” ― Seth Godin https://twitter.com/PaulJocelyn/status/1180069102007848960

It does start with a connectedness to ourselves and nowness to develop our connective behaviour or mutuality, as Kare Anderson shared with me via email. She pointed me to her book ‘Mutuality Matters‘ and her talk ‘Opportunity’ Makers‘ that I intend to explore to mull over her insights when time allows.

tree autumn leaf curiosity multidisciplinarity colors exploring rotana ty

A photo I shot during a stroll in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ― Albert Camus

 

“Fall has always been my favourite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.” ― Lauren DeStefano, Wither

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organisation’s ecosystem.

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“When we are curious, we engage the world by exploring, learning, and making meaning from our discoveries” — @ariannahuff

Curiosity is essential in our modern world and its importance. How do we develop curiosity and future skills?

Through this series of blog posts, I share how one can start to nurture and develop curiosity on their own and with peers.


How do you nurture and develop curiosity?

Did you enjoy the post? Check out the Tapestry Book.

Embracing complexity while engaging

“Education would be transformed if #learning how-to-learn was considered as important as what was to be learnt. To master the skills needed in the future, hand out fishing rods, not fish.” — @simbeckhampson

 

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms” – Source: For a More Creative Brain, Travel by Brent Crane, The Atlantic HT @elsua

One needs to connect the dots to connect them while travelling or wandering.

“The key, critical process is multicultural engagement, immersion, and adaptation.” – Source: For a More Creative Brain, Travel by Brent Crane, The Atlantic HT @elsua

Like on social media, this “key, critical process” matters when one engage.

“If a plane ticket isn’t an option, maybe try taking the subway to a new neighborhood. Sometimes, the research suggests, all that’s needed for a creative boost is a fresh cultural scene.”

 

“Social media creates within leaders and through them more capacity to metabolize the complexity of our modern world and turn it into a strategic advantage.” — @CelineSchill at #socialnowhttp://qaspire.com/2019/06/20/social-media-for-better-leadership-and-learning cc: @_Kavi @elsua @KenHMikkelsen @rotanarotana @leebryant” — @tnvora

engagement social media leadership complexity sketch tanmay vora learning rotana ty

Source: https://twitter.com/tnvora/status/1141554409307963392

 

“Thanks to social engagement, I am able to stay in touch with current thinking, participate in conversations/tweet chats around topics of my interest and become a part of an empowering network. I could learn, absorb patterns, prepare for the waves of changes likely to come, put some of those lessons into practice at work, and share my reflections back with community. In my case, social media made me a clearer thinker, better leader and a curious learner.” — @tnvora


Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organisation’s ecosystem.

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Meeting Community Hosts.


Meeting with Jillian Reilly, founder of Antacara

I have explored a possible collaboration with Antacara Frontiers. I met in person Jillian Reilly, the founder of this game-changing initiative, earlier this week in Paris. See this Twitter thread.

About Antacara Frontiers:

“At work. In life. Turn uncertainty into possibility with a 21st Century growth mindset. Our Exploratory Experiences help you to create new paths forward.”

It was lovely to meet and discuss with Jillian:

“So great to meet you last week in Paris Life is, indeed, a circus! Let’s find joy in the creativity that affords us. To play, to imagine, to soar high and do the seemingly impossible. So looking forward to seeing where our journey takes us.” — @changingview


Learn more about the activities and insights we have developed with Jillian and the Explorers community.

Meeting Harold Jarche, Personal Knowledge Mastery

I have also met in person another community leader and knowledge catalyst, Harold Jarche, over lunch in Paris.

“Sitting in a Paris cafe is always a great experience but less so with all the automobiles and pollution. We humans are good at making our cities toxic” — @hjarche

 

What we have experienced and discussed yesterday, Harold. :) Enjoy your time in the café. — @rotanarotana

It was a lovely and insightful conversation. I am always inspired by his work and actionable insights on work, learning and leadership:

“network leadership is about working together to make sure that people in the network are connected in a way that encourages flows of resources, information and support to every part of the network.” — HT @hjarche


Learn more about the activities and insights on Personal Knowledge Mastery I learn from and with Harold and the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club, a community of practice focused on distributed work and networked learning.

Meeting with Mara Tolja, Connectle

I have participated in a live conversation with Connectle after I got an invite from the community leader, Mara Tolja. The topic of this live conversation can be read below and the replay and related resources – including my blog post ‘Navigating the Knowledge Flows.


Read more in the Tapestry Book to explore ways and which for connecting and learning in the flow of life through ourselves, networks and communities.

How you do engage with your community and leaders?

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organization’s ecosystem.

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