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

eiffel v1

Source: Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine

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.

How do we keep exploring at our own pace?

Exploring Ways at our Own Pace

Work and learning are becoming multimodal and interlaced, with synced and asynchronous activities. More virtual ways, less long offline activities.

We travel less abroad. Only locally, when the health situation and conditions are allowed, and only if meeting with a team, customers, or partners is necessary. Preparing a meeting or any event goes online.

With more cities and countries exploring the idea of free-fare public transport, there is hope for a cleaner and more sustainable future.

Exploring Activities at our Own Pace

Intentional and paced activities help us to be productive and creative when we co-create, brainwrite and brainstorm through a platform and calls. We go live when we need to decide.

Practices are developed in online private communities of practice. Stories are discussed on work we do on our own and with our teams. People go back to blogs and online and offline communities to go deep into a fragmented world.

Public social networks help to connect and learn but not so much to go deep. They help to be exposed to global perspectives, though. We share our knowledge with other people. We ask questions. We chat in multiple rooms.

Arts such as poetry, music, photography, drawing, dance, sports, exhibits, festivals and prints are used to foster awareness, conversation and inspiration. In that way, we work on improving ourselves and together continuously.

Exploring, Connecting & Learning Together at our Own Pace

People connect over social networks. Then hang out on video or audio calls to get to know each other and test the waters. They become intentional and productive together through a private online platform and documents.

They pause. Sleep on whatever was produced. Review and reflect on. Add more ideas: test and iterate. Decide what is the best to keep and to eliminate. Finally, share the output. Tell the story.

Self-care is at the heart of the nowness of learning, work, travel and gathering. It is about managing better energy, focus, and attention and what is purposeful and essential when engaging oneself and others in human activities.

The hackathons, festivals, conferences, webinars, meetups, and workshops – go remote and in-person. They start with check-in and check-out—proper onboarding and offboarding with caring.

The focus is more on interacting and learning with the participants than being the speaker with a longish deck: conversation, purposeful gathering and community building over the content.

Do we pollute less? We consume less. We reuse—the resurgence of flea markets.

Music, sports, wellness and manual activities are integrated into the business experience to help people connect, have fun, enjoy experiences, care for each other and be creative and innovative.

People connect before, during and after an event through platforms and social networks. Collective knowledge is shared widely, retrievable and used for emerging projects and research.

Exploring & Developing Future Experiences & Skills at our Own Pace

Resilience and learnability are the two main strengths and capabilities that any organization or recruiter seeks to hire and onboard newbies in a project. The blog is how we now-proof our thinking and progress, and strengths.

Blogs show how we work, reflect, lead and learn out loud. The website/online portfolio is how we offer what we do, have done and what we are doing and improving.

We are in beta, working and learning continuously. ASAP is replaced by WTA – when time allows—responding meaningfully and deeply over instant and futile replies.

We help people to master disciplines, hone skills, learn new knowledge, skills and use new tools. We help people to let go of old-school practices and mental models. We know from new inspirations and actions.

We learn from subject matter networks and communities, not only from experts. We share which communities we belong to, the networks we play, the team we collaborate with, and projects we work on solo.

Small, local, remote and cheap experience is becoming the new normal to work, learn, travel and belong.

Exploring & Deciding at our Own Pace

Trustworthiness and taking risks are how we decide if we learn, work, travel and engage with people, a place, a project, a purpose, and experience.

Resetting, recalibrating, uncertainty, perpetual beta, resilience, caring, meaning, futures thinking, collective forces/mobs, modernity, caution and risks averse, deep learning and work, self-care and collective support, local travel, communities of practice.

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

On 21st October 2022, I hosted a three-hour in-person workshop with a local French partner in Le Grand Paris, France. It was fun, energizing and insightful. Discover my debriefing below.

Participants of the Soft Skills Workshop

Thirteen French solopreneurs from diverse sectors who activate and propel their soft skills.

As a workshop host, I invited the cohort:

  • To discuss the need for soft skills development over a monthly offline community chat.
  • To share knowledge and encourage conversations between participants on this topic.

Active Pedagogy

As a proponent of social learning, learning by moving, doing and reflecting, I turned the room into three or four pods of tables and chairs before the participants entered the room. To do so, I arrived twenty minutes before the kick-off of the workshop and got some help from the staff of my workshop’s partner. I intended to nudge the participants upon their arrival to go to a pod and later to be in a group of three or four.

This set the right conditions for forming a peer learning circle with listening, caring, sharing knowledge and reflection. As a host, my role was to suggest assigning roles (master of inclusion, master of time, master of production). Turning solopreneurs who barely know each other into teams of possible collaborators and fellow active learners.

Hosting the Soft Skills Workshop

Debriefing the Soft Skills Workshop

To Monitor

The roundtable was longer than expected: 20 minutes instead of 10. Leaving the floor to each participant to introduce themselves take time while being the time master as a host.

Leaving more time and space per team to get to know each other and collaborate on a precise and expected deliverable: the top skills and ways to activate and develop them as solopreneurs.

Welcoming, onboarding and offboarding the workshop participants with a few introductory words, smiles, tea and coffee. This is how, as I host, I show I care.

Setting up the workshop room with four pods of tables and chairs before the arrival of participants is physical and takes time. Next time, perhaps, invite the participants to do so, as well as a first collective effort.

After the workshop, the follow-up communication between moi and the local partner was ok. The participants got an actionable version of the deck I used to animate, and a few connected and carried on the conversation via Linkedin.

Matters Raised

The projection of the deck on the wall was too small sometimes to read the sources and small typography I added from my research and curation on soft skills and future skills.

No wifi in the room. Only smartphone connection. I did not need to use the Internet to host this workshop. The participants use their mobile to pull links and get inspiration on this topic per team. Fine.

Go Further: Future Skills²

You may enjoy the below oldies on soft skills and future skills.

Potential and Conversational

Strengths Building

Future Skills

Latest research from the World Economic Forum: Future of jobs 2023: These are the most in-demand skills now – and beyond

The Top Skills of 2023. core skills

What are your top five future skills?


What resources do you use to activate them?

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

We are about to wrap up this year. It is time to review the few writings I have shared over the past twelve months that flew by.

I had the chance to pause, reflect, write and refine deep thoughts and observations in-between tests, learning, and engagement, whether on a duo, team, network or community – level, in the context of the pandemic and shifts in my life and work.

What is the common thread of my writings this year? What theme is guiding my writing this year?

The deliberate explorations will arouse your curiosity with each article published over the months.

Deliberated Explorations – Wave 1

In Pluriversal, I kick-started the year by going deep into my Asian roots, defragging my thinking and breaking free learning.

In Healthy and Synchronicity, I shared observations on bringing back our sanity and looking for synchronicity in our lives and work.

In Embracing a community, I used the flight experience/onboarding metaphor to share my reflection and questions on community onboarding and engagement.

In March, I was grateful for the contributions of the women and the uniqueness of this month. Below is a photo I took in Paris.

paris march sensemaking networks communities

Deliberated Explorations – Wave 2

In Seeds, I highlighted thoughts and experiences related to shifting, urgent optimism, blogging, future skills, superpowers, and Norway.

In Feed, I expand my latest post to share my working and learning activities for the past few weeks.

In Breed, I keep on cultivating my share of working and learning out’s activities.

In Weed, I wrapped the series of four blog posts to share observations and thoughts on shifting and learning.

cultivation feed living house skills creativity work

Photo taken as part of an exhibition at the Centre d’art contemporain à la Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel.

Deliberated Explorations – Wave 3

In Summer Musings, I captured the readings, music playlist and exhibits I handpicked.

In Plurality, I was deliberated on the ways and which I developed habits and designed, nudged and created my glossary.

In Momentum, I shared my latest learnings and observations on upskilling and deskilling.

In Rippling, I amplify observations and thoughts on kindness, agility and experiences.

explorations délibérées deliberated explorations beach normandy review reflection

A photo I took on a beach in Normandy.

Deliberated Explorations – Gratitude

Thanks to Ryan Tracey for his post ‘Indecent proposals‘. It inspires me to review my posts for this year.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and the crème de la crème for the new year!

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

3 great ripplings of the week. In this curated post, I share noteworthy insights that have recently captured my attention: the significance of kindness, the importance of being agile, and the value of experiences. Continue reading to learn more.

Rippling 1: Kindness

How Being Kind Can Make You Fitter by Darebee

“You may not run world-class races where the stakes are high but smiling and being kind, in general, allows you to experience reduced stress, a higher overall level of wellbeing and it helps fight anxiety and inflammation in your body. This also helps your immune system stay healthy and your body remain biologically younger, longer.”

 

‘Spread that sh*t everywhere!’ –
Gapingvoid Culture Design Group 💕

#contagious#kindness#culturePaul Simbeck Hampson

kindness caring culture gapingvoid

In this Linkedin thread, we share with Paul and Daniel Durrant:

“Our tiny brain waves of kindness may sync up to form a collective tsunami. ” 

Never forget that the smallest kind act – a smile or kind words to someone that may not even return the gesture – can have a massive rippling impact that you may never even notice.” ― Daniel R. Durrant

Rippling 2: Agile Ways

If you work with agile methods and agile sensemaking, enjoy the two insightful posts below.

The future of work: agile “by design by Bertrand Duperrin

The common point: to constantly adapt to the context, to the demand, to try things quickly, to implement them, and to readapt a few weeks or months later once the context has changed.

If this is not agility stricto sensu, it bears the seeds of it: put the market, the internal or external customer’s need, the context at the center, abandon any idea of long-term certainty, proceed by short iterations.

Unfortunately, with the return to normalcy, few businesses have drawn the consequences and tried to capitalize on these exceptional practices that they had implemented and that, seemingly, worked.

An agile sensemaking framework by Harold Jarche

“Agile sensemaking could be described as how we make sense of complex challenges by interacting with others and sharing knowledge. More diverse and open knowledge flows enable more rapid sensemaking. I discussed the idea of agile sensemaking in 2018 and later created a sensemaking model (framework).”

“(…) The current agile sensemaking framework incorporates several other frameworks but it is designed to be as a simple as possible and flexible enough to adapt to new knowledge. Sensemaking in our connected world means engaging in professional social networks and finding communities of practice/interest. These can inform the work-to-be-done in our teams. Without these connections, from every worker, then our teams are blind. We have witnessed this in recent years with widespread leadership in chaos.” 

Rippling 3: Experience Design

UI is what you see, UX is how you feel.” ― Ryan Tracey

Conducting a SWOT analysis on the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) can address pain points and enhance the customer-centric experience of websites, employee learning experiences and organisations, in my opinion. Additionally, a digital audit of the website or employee learning experience complements the development of a tailored and relevant strategy.

To design an improved UI, co-design workshops are necessary following UX research during ideation workshops. Additionally, a digital audit of the website or employee learning experience complements the development of a tailored and relevant strategy.

The Art of *Hybrid* Gathering by Priya Parker

A hybrid gathering is not one gathering. It’s three.

If some people are in the same room or office and others are “dialing in,” there are three sites of group coordination and social dynamics to navigate: 1) the people in the room; 2) the online space (presumably some combination of boxes and a chat and a mute button); and 3) the interaction, if you so choose, between the people in the room and the people on “the Zoom.”

The good news: you’ve been practicing your in-person and online gathering skills for some time. In hybrid gatherings, you’ll make use of both. And then there’s a third skill: understanding when and how to weave them together.

As I host remote live learning sessions with cohorts of apprentices on subjects including creativity and innovation management, and business model innovation, I incorporate the valuable guidance of Priya Parker.

three great ripplings of the week beach agile experience design kindness trois belles ondes semaine bonté

A photo I shot during a stroll on a beach in Normandy, France.

Did you enjoy this post? Check out the Community Building.

High momentum. As winter approaches and the year nears its end, I am reminded of Albert Camus’ quote, “In the middle of winter, I discovered in myself an invincible summer.” With only one month left, some may be tempted to coast to the finish line, but a strong finish can make the entire year feel like a success.

What can you do in the next thirteeen days to build momentum and finish the year on a high note? It also encourages me to do a retrospective or futurespective of the year 2022 that has passed by so rapidly. How about yourself?

high momentum élan normandie plage apprentissage organisation éducation coopération

A photograph I took whilst walking along a beach in Normandy, France.

High Momentum 1: Workplace Futures

Visual Communication

“From this perspective, personalized interior design is a marketing tool for customers, prospects, partners and employees. It inspires confidence and seriousness and helps distinguish the company’s physical site from its competitive environment.” ― Les Echos Solutions

It is a key aspect of the staff experience, corporate branding, and workplace futures design.

Business Management

“Conversely, managing in the digital age is about enabling staff to bring value to customers. Making money is the outcome of a business model, not its goal.

Horizontal interactions are just as important as vertical communications. Leadership is present throughout the company and continuous innovation is central.” ― Forbes France

Please read my insights and observations from my professional network, covering leadership and beyond, including community engagement.

The Duality of Agility

“Hence it may be helpful to think of small “a” agile as an adjective and big “A” Agile as a noun; bearing in mind that big “A” Agile might also be used as an adjective to describe a person, place or thing that adopts the methodology.

Regardless, some of our peers rail against Agile as a redundant neologism. As with other trends such as Design Thinking, they argue it’s merely old world practices repackaged in a new box. It’s what we’ve always done and continue to do as consummate professionals.

But I politely challenge those folks as to whether it’s something they really do, or rather it’s something they know they should do.

If a new box helps us convert best practice into action, I’m a fan.” ― Ryan Tracey

“Agile” is a mindset comprised of beliefs, principles, practices, processes, and approach for effective thinking and execution. Constant development, iteration and reflection are integral to our continuous learning process.

High Momentum 2: Learning Futures

Community Fundamentals

“Explore the fundamentals of online community management through this eight-session course. Perfect for those new to the field of online community management, or anyone looking to brush up on the foundations of community.

This course includes eight sessions, with associated quizzes and worksheets, covering these topics:

  • Community Management Definitions
  • Community Strategy
  • Community Technology
  • Community Personas
  • Community Content and Programs
  • Kickstarting Online Engagement
  • Building Community Value
  • Measurement and Reporting

This course is designed for professionals working with both internal (employee) and external (brand, marketing, and support) community types.” ― TheCR Academy

As an internal community specialist, I continue honing my skills following my activations and certifications from the Community Roundtable Academy last year. Please stay tuned for my future updates on the insights I gained during this certified programme.

Why organizations don’t learn?

“And at a core level, the Fundamental Attribution Error (i.e. it’s probably not about or directed at you)” ― Rachel Happe

How do you develop your learnability skills now?

The role of reflection when students cooperate

“Thus, the systematic request for feedback on each session, involving reflection on specific points, has made it possible to establish a dialogue between teacher and students: the course itself becomes in a way a cooperative task. By agreeing to question themselves and to remain attentive to their students’ needs, the teacher who asks for feedback thus shows the model of the skills expected in group work.”― Élise Cantiran

Peer-to-peer evaluation and agile cooperation to continue learning together. I explore this through my work as a learning designer, trainer, and workshop host with an apprentice school.

Peer-to-peer evaluation and nimble collaboration to sustain ongoing learning. I explorer this through my role as a learner experience designer, teacher, and workshop host with an institution for apprenticeship.

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

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.

Propelling a Learner Experience

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 a Learner Experience

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 a learner experience

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 TBD
Reflection Mentoring, knowledge sharing & co-creating workshop, book club Forum, chat
Automation Flashcard, Q&A in duo or trio TBD
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 a Learner Experience

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 a Learner Experience

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 a Learner Experience

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.

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 a Learner Experience

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 a Learner Experience

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

“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.

Did you enjoy the post? Check out Future Skills.

4 Magnificent Summer Musings.

What are you listening to and reading this summer?

Below you’ll find some current and forthcoming reading. I’ve also included a few albums I’m enjoying.

Have a great summer!

Summer Musings & Readings

summer musings reading

Photos collage by Rotana Ty


River of Time by Jon Swain (Kindle)

To know better my South Asian roots: Cambodian and Vietnamese. Through the lens of an English journalist who lived and worked in those countries. Read more.

Ask for the Moon by Meredith Lewis (paperback)

To dive into innovation, kung-fu movies and the writing of Meredith Lewis, an Australian node in my network I met in 2021 remotely.

The Right Question by Meredith Lewis (ebook)

“A collection of provocations designed to help you to reflect deeply on your creative identity and practice.” – Meredith Lewis


Range by David Epstein (Kindle)

To dive into the topic of generalism after exploring neo-generalism. Read more.

Intentional by David Amerland (paperback)

I’ve read the book and wrote down some notes after the prompts/questions the author nudges the reader to answer to work on ourselves. Then, I review them and will reread the book.

Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers (ebook)

I enjoy reading the blog posts of Derek Sivers, hearing his podcast and sometimes chatting via email with him. I intend to read this book: Hell Yeah or No, and his latest one: How to Live.

Imaginable by Jane McGonigal (Audible)

As a member of the global community of ‘Urgent Optimists,’ I hear the audiobook along with my exploration of the community and its learning program, events and members.

The Carbon Almanac (ebook)

I discovered the book through a fellow Perpetual Beta Coffee Club member: Cat Barnard. I intend to hear the book and read the educator’s guide on the website.

The Perpetual Beta Series by Harold Jarche (ebooks)

“actionable insights on learning and working in a digitally networked society

The perpetual beta series began in 2014 as four standalone digital volumes, following my first ten years of blogging. The changing nature of work and our evolving perspectives on learning and knowledge were the core themes. These were combined into a single volume in 2018 and have been edited and updated about every 18 months since.

This latest volume — Perpetual Beta 2022 — builds on Perpetual Beta 2020 and includes new work since August 2020.

As we enter the third year of a global pandemic we are seeing the forces of disease, climate change, and political polarization combine and batter our markets and institutions. It will only be as a global networked society that we will be able to address these forces.

Welcome to life in perpetual beta, where work is learning, and learning is the work.” — Harold Jarche


The State of Community Management 2022 by The Community Roundtable (ebook)

The Community Roundtable sent the invite to download the report in my inbox. I intend to read it carefully and check out the webinar TheCR will host this June to discuss their findings and research.

The NEW Community Manager Handbook by The Community Roundtable (ebook)

“When you download The NEW Community Manager Handbook you’ll explore meaningful community management topics with 21 passionate community builders.” — @_shannonabram @TheCR


Dare to Un-lead by Céline Schillinger (Kindle)

“In this book Céline goes deep and develops well-researched explorations of the social turmoil of our times, linking its sources to the increasing atomisation in our modern societies and to yesterday’s and today’s workplace engagement challenges – why we work and how we work, and how it is all led and managed, or not.

She has studied the issues at depth and synthesises them extremely well into an inspiring framework underpinned by the three pillars of French democracy – liberté, fraternité et égalité

She has earned her wisdom and my deep respect.” Jon Husband


Summer Musical Musings

summer musings music playlist

Photos collage by Rotana Ty

Keys by Alicia Keys

55.4 by Sly Johnson

Persona by Selah Sue

Rêvalité by M

Mama Forgot Her Name Was Miracle by Mélissa Laveaux

Ghosts On Tape by Blood Red Shoes

Fear Of The Dawn by Jack White

Summer Artful Musings: Exhibits


Exhibit ‘City, Architecture & Care’ by Cynthia Fleury at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Paris

I heard for the first time about Cynthia Fleury through a multidisciplinary and creative learning program I participated in in 2018. When I arrived at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal – second floor – I saw her name on the wall and recalled who she was as I read the introductory description of the exhibit.

The setting and the scene she put in place in a rectangular way and many corners and per theme make the whole experience a lovely artful, and pedagogical one. Moreover, it is informative, full of explanations, maps, photography, archives, graphs and quotes from specialists.

In the context of the pandemic, it is an important work to help us rethink spaces, living, working, playing and third spaces, life and death, hospitals, gardens and even boats in their purpose and usages. Her craft and art with fellow artists and experts are for the societal memory of the local and big shifts citizens encountered and coped with. Here are some shots I took as I wandered into the exhibit.

summer musings pavillon arsenal exhibit city archictecture care

Photos collage by Rotana Ty


Exhibit In the Banlieues: Oakland/Saint-Denis at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Paris

The second most significant exhibit is about two cities: Oakland, USA, and Saint-Denis, France. I enjoyed the artful transmedia experience with the similarities and diversity between the two unique cities. From street art, music influences, artful spots, festivals, history of inhabitants, lifestyles and societal movements, to name a few, that caught my eyes. Check out below some photos.

summer musings pavillon arsenal exhibit cities

Photos collage by Rotana Ty


Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris

I went again on a Sunny day to one of my favourite places in Paris, the Foundation Louis Vuitton, which is at the intersection of elegance, architecture and contemporary art. My first time in this building was six years ago. Yet, I felt that this spot still has something unique and magnificent each time I enter the building, wandering over exhibits, around and outside the foundation, especially in the Jardin de l’Acclimatation.

summer musings foundation architecture

Photos collage by Rotana Ty


Exhibit Fugues in Color at Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Fugues in Color” will present works through which paint is free to escape the limited scope of the canvas. Colours and shapes discover new freedoms as they consume the surrounding spaces, such as the walls, floor, and ceiling. The diverse variations of colour extend into the architecture in close interaction with the Frank Gehry-designed building, and include works by five internationally-renowned artists of various origins and generations.

The Fondation will present simultaneously the “Simon Hantaï – The Centenary Exhibition” from 18 May 2022.

The first exhibit I visited was about forms, flows, fluidity, fastness and breaking free. I enjoyed it very much.

summer musings Fugues in Colors

Photos collage by Rotana Ty


Exhibit Simon Hantaï. The Centenary Exhibition at Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris

“To celebrate the centenary of Simon Hantaï’s birth (1922-2008), the Fondation is organising an unprecedented retrospective exhibition, in collaboration with the Hantaï family, curated by Anne Baldassari. It includes more than 130 of Simon Hantaï’s works, many of which have never before been shown, and the majority of which are large format works from 1957 to 2000.

Simultaneously, the Fondation will present “Fugues in Color” exhibition, in which paint is free to escape the limited scope of the canvas.”

I enjoyed the second exhibit crowded, hypnotic, intriguing, all about patterns and colourful again.

summer musings Simon Hantai

Photos collage by Rotana Ty

Summer & Atemporal Musings

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

Finally, I wrap up my blog series with a new post after reflecting and thinking about seeding, feeding, and breeding.

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

 

“As soon as I became proactive in producing my own stuff, I started getting other roles.” — Ray Liotta

Shifting

“VUCA: Virtual Unknown Chaotic Adaptable” —François Lavallée

 

“Peter Hinssen, in The Network Always Wins, describes the antidote to VUCA as VACINE.

  • Velocity

  • Agility

  • Creativity

  • Innovation

  • Network [Thinking]

  • Experimentation” Harold Jarche

 

“In transdisciplinary work and interdisciplinary collaborations, the overlap of ‘space’ – disciplines – is great for nurturing curiosity, moving into a space of ‘what if’.” — Deirdre Feeney #ANATSpectra2022 via @DangerousMere

Learning

The NEW Community Manager Handbook by The Community Roundtable

“When you download The NEW Community Manager Handbook you’ll explore meaningful community management topics with 21 passionate community builders.” — @_shannonabram @TheCR 

The next ten years: Why the future is better than you think. Gerd Leonhard’s keynote at WGS2022

A hug is worth more than ten Zoom calls. A future mindset is about existential leadership.

S4E83: Project management under conditions of inherent uncertainty with Dave Snowden – The Project Chatter Podcast via Anne Marie Rattray

My notes:

Knowledge management is to create the conditions for innovation or improve decision-making. Not about making knowledge explicit. Head -> mind -> mouth -> hands. Flows of knowledge.

Apprentice: learn knowledge after ten years of experience. You also learn knowledge through narrative knowledge. Become a narrative expert.

We are data riched but knowledge poor. The real deep knowledge is in stories of failures, not of success. Fictional failure. Practices. Institutionalize the making of mistakes to learn. Unfortunately, few people can tell stories. They speak only anecdotes.

Which skills do you use to make a decision? Artefacts? For your narrative. Discover meaning and knowledge instead of telling a story.

How can powerful informal social networks be? Informal and formal networks in IBM. Virtual environment. Give people a space for context-free information networks that are informal. Don’t try to formalize informal networks. Just enable them to create trust and entangled knowledge with informal networks across silos.

Focus on stimulating social networks. It looks for something that looks like a spider web. Put a process map down. Reveal and show reality. Get closer—organizational self-awareness.

Not about AI but about machine learning. What are the data sets behind it? Change the rules, and the computer takes time to adapt when a human is faster. AI training datasets building is the focus. Feed the machine with content but still give humans the final decision, not the machine.

Complexity management. Complex Adaptive System = entangled system. The science of uncertainty with different fields: systems thinking and complexity thinking related to nature.

The architecture of projects: not everything is ordered. It needs to be planned to deal with uncertainty through risk orders. Use a waterfall approach even for highly structured projects. You can use MVP and timeboxes to deal with the constraints of projects. SCRUM = liminal technique to iterate and improve projects in IT.

The fast iterative parallel hypothesis to work on? Multi ontology approach: identify coherent and parallel hypotheses in complex problems. Keep a parallel track.

You can’t deconstruct a complex system to solve a complex issue. So use the scaffolding approach instead. Don’t over-design. Make emerging properties. Build the basic scaffoldings in a project before using them intensively—no need to be copied or certified in agile.

Start with where people are. Map it—map knowledge. Use humans as sense-makers and sensors. Stop with the concept of transformation to roll out a consultancy. Consultants are butterflies; they pollinate.

Consultants should bring experts’ knowledge and perspectives. 1-5 apprenticeship model. Beyond, partners become sales. Consultancies need to move back to fertilization. The strategy is retroactive.

The pandemic: we won’t get rid of it yet. Next 10-15 years of massive disruption and migration of methods faster. Extreme discontinuity and uncertainty. Where complexity is critical, make climate change and micro issues concrete and understandable to people. Increase your options quickly to make decisions better regarding the climate change crisis.

Project management holds more extended options to make them actionable—anticipatory thinking. Multiple failures are a capability developed by those who produce them, like in Star Trek. Fail fast, fast forward. Have a whole day of failures. Scan more when you fail than when you succeed. Capture lessons learned. Work on your attitude. 

Uncertainty: you cannot prevent and eliminate it. You cannot manage complexity. You can’t control it. Navigate it. Complexity is built into projects. Build artefacts to deal with it.

Find inspirations by:
– Reading Sci-Fi books and business reports.
– Avoiding books on management about complexity, except scientific books.
– Reading physics books
– Avoiding neo-generalism, focusing on true generalism.
– Being dyslexic. Seeing connections people don’t see.
– Picking up any page on a book or document and seeing its meaning immediately.
– Read the original, not the summary of a book.

Please get rid of a project manager and replace it with a project management crew. Captain can change. There is a position for anyone. Anyone can pass the ball.

Enjoying

The Black Keys — Your Team is Looking Good

“What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” — Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator via Jake Adelstein

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Community Management.

Let’s continue with my series of posts, from seeds and feed to breed.

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

Shifting 🚶🏻

Nudge #1: walking away from my desk 🖥️

“I hear it from just about every one of my clients. “I’m burnt out.” Or “I’m so sick of virtual.” Or “I know it’s important, but I just don’t have any time to think on this.”

I’ve felt these same sentiments at one time or another over the last year, which is why I knew I needed something to benefit my mental health and productivity. Want to know what I did to improve things? I chose to walk away from my desk.*

(…)

Affordable Change-It-Up Day Ideas

  • Work from home? Do you know someone else near you who also works from home? Arrange a day to invite that person to work from your home, sharing the living room, dining room, or outdoor space. And then next month, go to that person’s home. In short, you’re creating your own coworking environment without all the costs of going to a coworking space.
  • Grab a notebook and pen and take yourself to your favorite hike or park. Find a place where you can sit and reflect on a work issue, and take note of your thoughts and any action steps.
  • Go for a drive. Turn on a relevant podcast, or a reflective playlist, and see where the road (and your mind) takes you.” — Jenny Weigle

What is Change-It-Up Day? Jenny writes:

“It is not a replacement for seeking serious mental health help, nor will it make all of your worries go away. It IS a welcome and necessary break that, so far, has already proven to feed my brain and provoke my curiosity. That’s exactly what I need these days.”

Your turn. How do you give yourself a break?

“I try to be like a forest: revitalizing and constantly growing.” — Forest Whitaker #Cannes2022

You may also enjoy my oldie on navigating knowledge flows.

Nudge #2: empowering learners to change the world 🌍

I’ve discovered the Carbon Almanac, “the powerful tool to help us create change, right here and right now”, thanks to a LinkedIn live hosted by Seth Godin and Cat Barnard, co-owner of Working the future. Cat is also a fellow seeker from the Perpetual Beta Coffee Club. We engage monthly over a coffee chat with other community members.

I found fascinating and highly valuable the work that this global community did through the release of a book I intend to read and resources I look forward to digging into. As I become a teacher for an apprenticeship school next September, I also consider using those resources and the educator’s guide with apprentices.

As put on the website:

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” — R. Buckminster Fuller


Nudge #3: working shifts 👥

“Online, asynchronous, and transparent work not only captures knowledge better than meetings, it increases flexibility and suits many peoples’ needs/preferences #SocialNow” — @rhappe

 

“Instead of just working out loud, I encourage reflecting and thinking out loud, which is something I do regularly #SocialNow” — @rhappe

You may also enjoy this post by Gaylin Jee on hybridity in which there are five pointers/questions to trigger conversation on the present of work.

Thinking about 🤔

Designing for Unpredictability of Use by Taruna Goel

“Do you think about the unexpected use(s) of the learning products/ services you create? Do you imagine how your “learning product” may be reused, reshared, or remixed in serendipitous ways?”

How Sweet Home by Luis Suarez

One of my favourite bloggers and learning partners has resumed his blogging mojo to go beyond walled gardens and media tools. So read on and be inspired for your sensemaking practice, too.

Loving 📻

-M- Matthieu Chedid — Dans Ta Radio

Dans le casque de… Sly Johnson

Did you enjoy the post? Check out Community Management.

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

Thinking about

Question of the Month 1

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

Embracing synchronous and asynchronous ways to collaborate, co-create and cooperate within a distributed org, 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 of the Month 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 of the Month 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

You share excellent practices—a blend between manual and automated efforts FTW. 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.

Working on

Designing and hosting digital marketing and culture workshops for a French apprenticeship school.

Developing a business partnership.

Stay tuned.

Learning

“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

Bonus.

“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

Enjoying

Here is my music Spring playlist. You enjoy it, too.

Jack White featuring Q-Tip – Hi-De-Ho 

FKJ – Way Out

The Weeknd – Out of Time

Alicia Keys – Dead End Roads

Cat Power – Pa pa power

Selah Sue – All the way down

Next: Breed.

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!

I’ve been thinking about shifting, urgent optimism, blogging, future skills, superpowers, and Norway. So enjoy what is coming below.

Thinking about

Brittleness

From VUCA to BANI. Post-Normal. Urgent Optimism. Read more.

March

The transition between the Global New Year and the Asian New Years. The crisis in Europe. The International Women’s Day. Spring. New beginnings. Read more.

Mulling over

“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 turn the crème de la crème of posts into a book, share deep thoughts about what caught my attention, observe ideas from interesting people, and anchor/revisit stories, experiences, and practices.

Working on

Digital marketing workshops – networking, creating valuable content and communicating in a network era. They will include deep dives, activities, nudges to share a reflection collectively, a production, knowledge and questions around:

  • Enhancing personal brand and assets.
  • Building, learning from, engaging with, and contributing to our network.

Stay tuned.

Learning

Activating superpowers

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.

As David Ross asks in his Linkedin post, how can we spot and activate our superpowers? It takes time, effort, and self-knowledge to understand and use at least one superpower. However, once our superpower is unleashed, social learning thrives.

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.

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.

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

“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 Chinese New Year and the upcoming Cambodian New Year. The month of World Futures Day. The month the world lives in unsettled and strange times with the pandemic and the crisis in Europe. So what do the present and futures of Europe look like? Feeling powerless, so sad. What can we do? We can donate and help, educate ourselves, make sense in networks, and perhaps activate our urgent optimism.

March. On the 8th, there will be the International Women’s Day celebration. I am so grateful for a few women in my network and the communities of practice I engage. Thank you for their empathy, kindness, nudges, questions, actionable insights, support, boldness, uniqueness, resilience, elegance, exploration, curiosity, creativity, beauty, artfulness, humour, ingenuity, vulnerability, attention, vibrance, energy. To name a few: 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, Rosie Sherry.

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 I am in motion to explore, activate, rewind my journey, update my toolkit, stay curious, collide, ask myself why, innovate, develop new capabilities and mindset, and embrace the unknown?

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

Next: Seeds.

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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.

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I share what has caught my attention lately. Enjoy.

“If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.” William Shakespeare via Klara Loots

 

“One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.” — Paul Cézanne via Leyla Kikukawa

 

“In psychology, synchronicity is defined as the occurrence of meaningful coincidences that seem to have no cause; that is, the coincidences are acausal. The underlying idea is that there is unity in diversity if the sample size we are looking at is big enough, global even.” — David Amerland

 

“Healthy communities are a lot less emotionally exciting. They are actually mentally calming places that help people really thoughtfully consider options and support individuals in their growth.” — @rhappe

 

“Communities are not committees or project teams. People want to join them. Members feel affinity for communities which are centred on learning & improving as a professional. Communities of practice are becoming an essential component of getting work done.” @hjarche

 

“Maybe, that future of business, that “new normal”, that dream and desire for a “new beginning” are not fulfilled by an “HOW TO” recipe to be executed but through the devotion and commitment to the practice of remembering our humanity and re-imagining it through art (through the hearts).” @FBanishoeib

 

“Adopt a mutuality mindset by asking follow-up questions & seek sweet spots of mutual interest in conversations to attract diverse allies,to collectively see more sides of a situation (potential problem or opportunity) and make smarter decisions faster together, for each other.” — @KareAnderson

 

“Out of clutter find simplicity. From discord find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” — Albert Einstein via @swissmiss @johnmaeda

 

mood pyramid lizandmollie

Source: https://twitter.com/lizandmollie/status/1460375380498399235

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

New year, new possibilities. Pluriversal, visual thinking and continuous learning.

Pluriversal: Being at the Heart of Asia

New year, new possibilities. Pluriversal ones. In a few weeks, on February 1st 2022, there will be another celebration of the Chinese Lunar Year, the Year of the Tiger. Since last year, I have gained more interest in learning more about China as it is one of my roots, and I am interested in the future of Asia. Especially the Belt Road Initiative and its expansion in Africa, how China is going green, working on setting Chinese Standards 2035, and how citizens work on local green initiatives.

Cambodia is also a lot in my quest to better understand my roots and the country’s evolution with the river Mekong; its history. Watching the movie by Angelina Jolie, ‘First They Killed My Father’ is one of my action items.

In France, some instigators help us better understand how Asian arts, cinema, sports and crafts are spotlighted and shared. Another third celebration of the Khmer New Year is upcoming, too. On April 13th 2022, it will be the Year of the Tiger as well.

books china cambodia japan rotana ty

Some books are on my reading list.

Japan is the third country I pay attention to weekly. Yet, I have always been in love with Japanese sub-culture, from fashion to food, martial arts, music and cinema, the evolution of social norms and usages of technology.

India is the fourth country under my radar as I met the past few Indians and got a few folks from this part of the world on my social network. The country is another game-changer in the Asia Pacific.

Born and living in France, I am keen to balance my viewpoints from the Occidental and Oriental worlds. I am nurtured and shaped by different worlds, perhaps a pluriversal world as Sahana wrote in her excellent piece:

“The new narratives are the voices of many—connected across countries and nations, forests and islands, villages and cities—by values, beliefs, and wisdom sourced from the deepest of humanity. A wisdom that arises from living an entangled life with the living planet that is their home and provider of livelihood. They have long been stewards of their ecosystems—long before colonization, imperialism, industrialization, and then globalization displaced them.

They are once again becoming the harbingers of a new civilizational order—unencumbered by the one-size-fits-all Eurocentric narrative of development and progress.

A world that operates beyond the narrowness of ‘isms’ and dogmas.So new narratives are being woven. Strand by strand. Diverse contexts, cultures, communities are being woven together.

Yet not striving for homogeneity. Heterogeneity is the foundational value—a pluriversal world where many worlds fit. This is no longer about ‘scaling up’ but ‘scaling sideways’, and when needed, ‘scaling down’.

It is about entanglement, learning from each other, modifying, trying, failing, and then trying again.” 

With this extensive and endless focus on some parts of the Asian world, I am still figuring out ways to self-care, know myself and go deep into a fragmented world.

Pluriversal: Defragmenting Written & Visual Thinking

For the past Winter festive season, 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.”

It is sometimes not so easy to map our thoughts when we encounter challenges of fragmented writing. From this oldie on personal knowledge mastery’s activities and tools I use, I noticed that I often wrote on not an agnostic platform but on many ones: from Twitter and Slack to IM messaging tools and email, WordPress for my blog, a book, Google Keep and Google Apps, Office documents and Clickup documents.

So how can I unify and streamline those flows of writing into one river of write-ups?

My writing is still a weekly or bi-weekly activity, though. Even if it is planned, I’m not consistently doing it while being aware of this:

“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

Perhaps, it is also worthwhile to consider these thoughts below as I have started from scratch and will carry on doing so with the Chinese and Cambodian New Year:

“This week, look for opportunities to bring self-compassion to your self-talk. How might you balance ownership and responsibility with kindness and maybe even a little levity?” – Andrea Howe

Pondering.

Pluriversal: Breaking Free Continuous Learning

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” – Confucius

I am learning about our learning communities, learning organisations and teams, the lifetime learner, the learning strategies and active learning. The focus on learning about culture and organisms is still one of my focuses.

Below are my latest thoughts in beta on distributed learning through a McLuhan tetrad.

distributed learning

My two cents on distributed learning through the visual I produced.

In the context of the pandemic and beyond, how can continuous learning in network experience be designed, generated and hosted?

“In short, generative learning isn’t just ‘being actively involved with the subject matter’, but rather doing something with what you have to or want to learn. It’s generative when you produce new things like making a concept map or a drawing about the subject matter.” – Paul A. Kirschner & Mirjam Neelen

Perhaps this idea from the latest post by Helen Blunden is worth exploring:

“I find some things’ missing’ from the current rhetoric about modern work. What’s missing is creativity, empathy, human connections, social gatherings, personal learning, communication and community ).

In future, I’d like my new back yard to be a space where I can entertain people or bring people into this space and make it as some kind of social learning space where I can teach others to knit, or have French meetups or a neighbourhood book club – but these are just ideas at the moment.”

On the same wavelength for businesses?

“Set up a system to support learning. As business rapidly evolves, it’s clear there is a growing gap between those who learn well and quickly and those who do not. How are you increasing your capacity to synthesize new information? Developing the skill of mastering yourself will only compound and continue to pay dividends as the year’s march forward.” – Shannon Tipton, in one of her newsletters, January 2022

 

“Learning isn’t about the delivery of content. It’s the experience of content rich ideas, activities, processing time and reflection” – Kim Cofino

What if workplace learning experiences are designed with the resources from the Communities of Practice Playbook published by the European Commission?

The learning organisation, team, and society become a learning community building and hosting project with the members to unleash and enhance its learning and engagement potentials. Back to what I’ve reflected on through a community series I started last year.

I explore behind-the-scenes with approaches, canvas, and templates from experienced community professionals and newbies.

“A community is a group of people who agree to grow together.” – Simon Sinek

Pluriversal: Continuous Learning & the Tapestry Book

Did you enjoy this post? Discover the Tapestry book.

 

From frequent curated posts, I have reviewed and captured the crème de la crème of insights I spot over 2021.

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” — Ursula K. Le Guin 

Curated in: myriad.

“Two important sensemaking types of tools that everyone should use are feed aggregators and social bookmarks. Though the specific tools may change, everyone needs a way to control the push of information and a way to save, categorize, and annotate resources for later use.” — @hjarche

Curated in: emergent mindsets and strategies.

On Value Creation

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

Curated in: start with art and heart to work and learn.

“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 & ess

ays & stories & speeches will be about.” — Cory Doctorow

Curated in: Tapestry – deep work behind-the-scene.

“👉 Show Your Work = finished product, serves to inform others and gain feedback.
👉 Work Out Loud = work in process, serves to invite others and gain collaborators.” — @britz

Curated in: feedback on feedback²

“Don’t ask for feedback. Ask for advice. You ask for action steps to get better. In that way you create a partner. When you ask for feedback you create a critic.” — Daniel Pink

Curated in: align.

On Learning

“I don’t have one mentor. My network mentors me.” — Reid Hoffman

Curated in: mentoring.

“Social learning is not a separate activity at work; it is one that is a vital part of daily work. So, if something crops up as you work, e.g., you might read something or hear something or do something that others might benefit from, then it’s important to share it with them.

Having said that, it’s also important to share effectively and discriminately – and not over-share. It’s about adding value to other people’s working lives and not overwhelming them with stuff, and certainly not about trying to reach the top of some artificial leaderboard that rewards those who post the most! But unless L&D does this themselves in their own teams, they cannot help or role model this behavior in others.” — @C4LPT

Curated in: learning shifts.

“I have reflected about that  story quite a few times since then – emotions, as you know, create sustainable memories … and it has anchored in my mind a conviction in the power of “social learning” : it is by sharing with others that light comes !  Whatever knowledge, information or  insights we receive, it is by discussing, confronting and mirroring with others that they eventually make sense, and therefore are profoundly learned.” — Thierry Bonetto

Curated in: deep artful work.

On Community Building

“Every combination of people in a group contributes to the greater dynamic. For a group to be healthy, it should bond as a whole, but also nurture individual relationships within itself.” — @dremilyanhalt

Curated in: random collisions.

“While we all may not be experts in all areas, we can balance our strengths with the strengths of others to create value for ourselves, our teams, and our communities.” — @kschottphoto

Curated in: agency and velocity.

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

Curated in: paths and community reflection.

“… 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

Curated in: starting in a community.

“Community is much more than belonging to something; it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter.” — Brian Solis

Curated in: best of all Autumn.

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

Curated in: potential and conversational.

“Social learning is about people in trusted relationships sharing and building collective knowledge. The prime role for ‘learning & development’ professionals will be to help make connections by supporting professional networks and communities of practice.” — @hjarche

Curated in: on the edges.

“Q for those who have worked remotely for a long time in bigger teams: How do you keep in contact with distant colleagues? Those with whom you don’t need to interact for work? What do you do to not forget them or be forgotten by them?” ― @katerinabohlec

Curated in: two powerful questions for reflection.

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

I look back to look forward. 2021: what are my main themes, moments of change and ripples?

Community Management

I went deeper into the discipline of community management this year in various ways:

📜 Certified by The Community Roundtable: Community 101 | Community Frameworks and Models’‘Online Community Fundamentals’, Community Program Essentials.

📜 Reviewed the State of Community Management report 2021.

✍️ Continued the community blog post series with new posts: Community Reflection. Starting a Community. Hosting a Community.

✍️ Reflected on video effects and the shift to communities while using the McLuhan tetrad. Examined small online communities while using the McLuhan tetrad.

🌍 Joined Rosieland: “Community and education for community building people.”

🌍 Engaged in a few communities of practice – global and local.

An exhibit, ‘Arts of fighting in Asia’ in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, made me reflect on how we align in life and work.

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

LEARN MORE

Learning Innovation

Learning on my own in networks and communities is still my intense focus and capability. Call it learnability, learning agility or continuous workplace learning. My cornucopia keeps evolving through a bunch of activities:

💻 Last year, I went to the Learning Technologies France conference to get a pulse on what’s happening in the workplace learning space. This year it was not on the ground in Paris but remotely.

☕ Participated again in the PKM Workshop hosted by Harold Jarche and monthly PBCC chats. Discover more in the #PKMastery series.

🤝 Attended the Future of Corporate University conference. My notes: Workplace Learning For All.

✍️ Shared my notes from the ‘Women in Learning’ podcast on mentoring.

🚀 Attended a webinar by INSEAD and shared my notes: supercharge your Ingenuity & Innovation.

Future Skills

Learnability is the mother of future skills. Through learning out loud posts and a curated post, I shared my iterations of what a future skills map or puzzle can look like:

🚶 Motion.

🧩 Activation.

🚀 Potential and Conversational.

This future skills map could be used by individuals, teams, networks, organisations and communities of practice to assess the state of their future skills and to explore the people, pedagogies and projects needed to enhance their learning and community potential.

One of the family skills in the future skills map is futures thinking. I sharpened my understanding and practice of futures thinking through an IFTF course and community in 2021:

📜 Certified after completing the course: Life after Covid-19: Get Ready for our Post-Pandemic Future. Shared blog posts on some activities and productions we did during the course: distributed learning futures, Water Future Shifts, Growing Better From Anywhere Shifts.

🌍 Participated sometimes in the IFTF meetups that occurred monthly with fellow futurists.

Sensemaking

Being engaged within communities, learning continuously and developing future skills and thinking. Combining the three activities triggered the need to make sense of my learning journey and our crazy world. One of the shapes that emerged to do so was through book reading, notetaking, writing and publishing:

✍️ Unleashed the work behind the scene for the Tapestry book I wrote, edited, designed and published this year. I am grateful to each person who bought the Tapestry Book, promoted it, read it, shared feedback, and helped me produce it.

✍️ Shared my book annotated reading: A Brave New Era: Harold Jarche on Perpetual Beta — Our New Normal written by Harold Jarche.

📚 Captured from Community Book Clubs. Hosted by moi over three weeks in the Explorers community: Four Timeless Exploratory Books. Notes from the Book The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker hosted by The Community Roundtable.

Visual thinking is also another shape of my sensemaking. Hiking and road trips in the French mountains and villages made me reach new heights.

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

READ MORE

 

I share what has caught my attention lately. Enjoy.

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” — Ursula K. Le Guin via @eqlabco

 

“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

 

“In dynamic environments, our scope of control narrows. It no longer makes sense to think of strategy as a plan to control our future. Instead, strategy becomes a continuous learning process, a set of practices to explore, interpret, and experiment.” — Ed Morrison via Paul Jocelyn

 

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” — E. O. Wilson via @CurtisOgden

 

“We can’t change our behaviour without changing our mindset – that’s why management concepts that focus only on behavior are not very sustainable.”  — Rebecca Vehling


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

After reflecting on communities’ engagement and starting a community, designing, onboarding, and hosting a community come to mind. Those activities are the next natural steps of any community instigator and host.

Where does everything start with designing, onboarding, and hosting a community of practice or a learning community? Especially when communities go remote and distributed. Any community professional would say first with community strategy and design, right?

Instead of writing a longish new post, here is below a flowchart I produced via Whimsical. First, there are the three scenarios I shared in the post on starting’ a community – enriched with some thoughts on how a community could be designed, onboarded, hosted and supported.

“The strength of the individual is the community. The strength of the community is the individual.” —  @GeorgeSiosi


A Reading List

What are “communities of practice”? by Dr Nicole Brown

The Basics of Community Strategy by @TheCR

Throwback Thursday – Community Strategy 101 by Shannon Abram

Why a community roadmap is important by Shannon Abram

The Peril of Top-Down Approaches To Community by Feverbee

When you’re starting a community, really you are designing one by Rosie Sherry

Your role in a community by Simon Tomes

Engagement Pyramid by Gideon Rosenblatt & Mobilisation Lab

Three Community Myths Busted – Goodbye 90-9-1 Rule By Ted McEnroe

Participation and silence by Taruna Goel

The Purpose Of Member Profiles by Feverbee

connect|share|lead by Isabel De Clercq

Lessons from the pandemic by Stephen Downes

Learning activities by Etienne Wenger

Community Series by Rotana Ty

Rethinking Your Community Engagement

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

LEARN MORE

I share what has caught my attention lately. Enjoy.

Lin Yutang on the beauty of autumn:

“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age.

It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.”

Source: My Country and My People via James Clear

fall leaves road grand paris

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

“Much like we find ourselves by getting lost, Iyer suggests, we inhabit the world more fully by mindfully vacating its mayhem:

Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.” via Maria Popova


On the Value of Walking

“Walking is a smart way to experience a whole host of physical, mental and psychological benefits. Introducing it into your daily routine will help you benefit long-term in your cardiovascular and aerobic fitness goals. It will help extend your lifespan and help you meet your weightloss goals.” — Darebee


On Reimagining Remote Methods

“Situated Immersion: Instead of defining the “field” as somewhere to go spatially, the field becomes a practice, a way of relating to people, places, and activities. Home and field come into new relation, just as “private” and “public” distinctions are reworked on digital platforms.

Situating fieldwork means locating one’s self in the research, building on existing ties or seeking new field sites based on how and where you are — whether or not that entails geographic proximity. As with autoethnography, situatedness risks limiting the communities researchers can access, but can equally offer new resources for understanding lived experience.”

“(…) Being immersed in remote fieldwork meant switching attention between Zoom and good-night hugs, just as my interlocutors negotiated boundaries of digital and co-present, public and private.

Situating research in these partial connections, to embrace fragmented, patchwork methods, means rethinking remoteness not as across distance but as potentially enabling new forms of mutuality and care.”Jordan Kraemer


On Distributed Work

“I just wish every single executive, their teams, and from there onwards the entire employee workforce!, would take such workshop to understand the network dynamics, the necessary digital skills & capabilities we would need to acquire and excel at, so that we can then focus on those enterprise community building programmes to thrive in this brave new world we have just entered with distributed work.” — Luis Suarez


On Community & Engagement

“Community is much more than belonging to something; it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter.” — Brian Solis

 

“Healthy engagement resists instrumentalization of persons, despite efficiency imperatives: engaged people are genuinely “seen” by their peers and their hierarchy, respected in their diversity and in their free will. Healthy engagement rises in environments that favor cohesion, offer tangible support, focus energy towards the same direction (through buy-in, not coercion), over time and in action.

Engagement calls for reciprocal and protective leadership – leadership understood not as a title or a function but as a dynamic partnership process.”

At a time when civic and professional engagement seem to be a response to many contemporary challenges, this issue raises the urgent and vital question of our practices of command and leadership.” — Céline Schillinger

 

“There are four types of conversations that are broadly applicable to any situation, and that are especially necessary for harnessing a group’s thinking during adaptive challenges:

1) conversations for relationship-building,

2) conversations for mutual understanding,

3) conversations for possibilities,

and 4) conversations for action.

We are using the term “conversation” to mean, the interaction that occurs when each person is actively working to understand the meaning the other is trying to convey.”Nancy Dixon


On Activating Strengths

“When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” — Audre Lorde

“(…) How will your strengths interplay with your lived experiences?

What will shift for you, those you serve, and your communities of practice?” Shirley F. Rivera


On Unleashing Your Community Potential

Community Management helps propel your internal community and scale engagement to keep learning and innovating with your organization’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. It 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. It 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, which 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

Long time, no actionable insights were shared on this blog. However, here is below what has caught my attention lately. From a newsletter of Liz & Mollie in a chat with Joanna Miller, Lead of Organizational Effectiveness & Coaching at Asana:

“L+M: We talked with you about how to more closely align your life with your values, and you mentioned you often advise people to get “10% more [insert personal value; ex. creative] this week.” Can you share what that means?

J: Your values are a useful filter for orienting yourself when you feel rudderless or are facing a big decision. Some of my values are curiosity, empathy and meaningful connection.

If I feel lost or misaligned, I ask myself, “How could I be 10% more curious this week? Or how can I make my next interaction 10% more meaningful?

Focusing on making my next step 10% more [insert value] helps me move into action more quickly instead of falling into the perfectionist’s pitfall of overthinking.”

From a print about Bruce Lee’s journey and philosophy at the terrific exhibit ‘Arts of fighting in Asia’ in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, France. As an ex martial artist, I went to this exhibit this weekend and pulled that quote with Google Lens:

“Instead, he opened a small Martial Arts School in Seattle-the Jung Fan Kung-fu Institute. There he met Linda Emery and married her later that same year.

Despite his youthful success in Chinese films, his hopes for an American movie career soon faded. “It was difficult for me to start my career in America,” he said “since roles for Chinese were rare and those that were avail able always seemed to go to Japanese.”

So Bruce turned his full attention to Kung-fu, moving his school to Oakland and later to Los Angeles His school taught a more dramatic and spectacular form of Kung-fu, his own Jeet Kune Do. Even in this, he made enemies. He simply did not believe in the strict rituals and movements that made up most forms of the Martial Arts. Instead he took the best from each form, explaining: “Jeet means to stalk or to intercept, Kune means fist or style, and Do means the way or the ultimate reality. In other words “the way of the intercepting fist.” The purpose of Martial Arts is not form. The ultimate goal is to stop your opponent fast and efficiently. This is why teach mostly offensive moves.”

[Bruce] Lee denounced any technique that stressed form rather than action. He also denounced their accompanying rating systems. “I don’t have any belt whatsoever,” he stated. “That is just a certificate. Unless you can really do it, that belt doesn’t mean anything.

As his attitudes spread, so did his reputation as a teacher. Among those attracted to his school were James Coburn, Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin and James Garner. Their influence, plus his “discovery” at an international karate tournament at Long Beach in 1964, led to his first screen role in America as Kato in the television series “The Green Hornet” in 1966

In the early 1960’s the word karate was already becoming familiar to the American public but the groin kicks and the eye gouges used to subdue the attackers weren’t ready to be accepted. The movies, however, were very much impressed by the flashy. action. The turnabout came in 1962, when James Bond used a superficial form of karate in “Dr. No.” The final acceptance came in 1966 when Bruce Lee played Kato and became the first completely authentic practitioner of Kung-fu to demonstrate incredible combat techniques that had never been seen before by the public.

In “The Green Hornet” Lee had never permitted his art to be shown in bad light. flatly refused to fake long, visually exciting but totally unrealistic battles when he could easily stop his opponent with a few well aimed movements. To this end, he suggested that the action be captured in slow motion photography. He did allow himself to indulge in some fancy jumps and, because of their visual effect, he also adopted the nunchaku sticks as a permanent prop. They are still associated with his name today, more than any other.”

See the print with the extract and more photos from the exhibit below.

From the Pinkcast.

Don’t ask for feedback. Ask for advice. You ask for action steps to get better. In that way you create a partner. When you ask for feedback you create a critic.” — Daniel Pink

For yours truly.

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

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

After I got back from vacation, this week of recalibration was interesting while engaging one conversation at a time in social networks. Questions trigger deep, meaningful connections and conversations. Below are two questions that you may consider mulling over as well.

The Power of Marinating Ourselves While Travelling

“The word, “marinate” describes exactly what happens when one travels. My Dad is a traveler and calls himself a “citizen of the world”. He has always been a walker, and that’s how I like to soak in the sights and sounds of a new place. It is in the streets where a city lives, where it’s people are; not in a museum or a tourist spot. My favourite way to really hug a city is to enjoy a quiet hour or two in whatever is the city’s version of a central, accessible, public park.

What is your favourite thing to do when traveling? How do you learn the culture of a place? How do you “marinate your head”?”

Taruna Goel

A Linkedin post I published this week triggers a conversation with Taruna and those questions she shared. As always, such an inspiring insight and experience not only from her but from her father, too.

The Power of Weak Ties in Social Networks

“Q for those who have worked remotely for a long time in bigger teams: How do you keep in contact with distant colleagues? Those with whom you don’t need to interact for work? What do you do to not forget them or be forgotten by them?” 

Big thanks to my friend and learning partner, Luis Suarez (@elsua), for sharing this question, thoughts and insights in his Linkedin post. I highly recommend you dive into the comments to read thoughts and actionable insights from Luis network. This gem from Luis I preserve over here caught my attention:

“Right on, Rotana Ty! And all in all, always thinking in the long-term and over the years. That’s one of the key aspects people tend to forget from social networks and online communities. They are not an overnight ‘project’ but a lifetime investment.

You know when you start, but it never ends one conversation at a time. At a different pace, enjoying and savouring that #SlowSocial mood, it’s the most powerful opportunity to invest in one’s personal business relationship(s), because you never know when you’re going to need them next, right? 😉 heh”

Luis Suarez
2 powerful questions for reflection horses riding bagnas

Photo shot by my brother while riding in Bagnas, the nature reserve of Agde, by bike this Summer


The Power of Scaling Engagement

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

LEARN MORE

Emergent Mindsets & Strategies – Curated Insights

When time allows I share the crème de la crème of actionable insights from my network and beyond.

“Seeing with fresh eyes Creates a sense of wonder, Even in tedium.” — Kapil Dawda

 

“The way to get to the future is the future you get.” — Myron Rogers HT @CelineSchill

 

“Emergent strategy: “We cannot know first, then act. We must experiment tentatively, learn more about our context, and continuously revise our plans.” – From Scotland’s nature preservation organization @nature_scot” HT @marshallk

 

“The state of brittleness in our world is an outcome of an efficiency mindset that has long been prevalent. That’s because efficiency has been a competitive advantage. Competing is now about resilience more than efficiency, and that will be a tough transition to accept.” — @johnmaeda

 

“Life is bristling with thorns, andI know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.“ — Voltaire via @bronwynwilliams

 

“For so long we tried to hide our roots: everything that enables us to show up to work and the world as the strong, stately versions of ourselves.

Our health.
Our families.
Our communities.
Our passions and dreams and causes.

But the past 18 months has revealed what we always knew: it’s one system. You don’t get to marvel at the tree without nurturing the roots.

So we don’t want to hide our roots anymore- pretend they don’t matter.

And our workplaces should see this as a gift – the opportunity to engage with the bounty of a whole human. Imagine what’s possible then …” @changingview

 

“I don’t want to be that person that is not going to speak up for myself whatever career choices I make or whatever life decisions I make, I will walk away with my dignity” — @LucyLiu in the Asian Enough Podcast

 

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” Baldwin, born on this day in 1924, on writing via @brainpicker

 

“Many people with ADHD are quite visually driven and thrive with consistency.” — Mandy Caruso, @clickup

 

“Two important sensemaking types of tools that everyone should use are feed aggregators and social bookmarks. Though the specific tools may change, everyone needs a way to control the push of information and a way to save, categorize, and annotate resources for later use.” — @hjarche


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

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

4 Timeless Exploratory Books On My Bookshelf

From the end of August until mid-September, I have hosted three sessions for our community book club and chat with fellow explorers from the 21st Century Explorers Community. In addition, I share four books that I have enjoyed reading and inspire me in my exploration as a flâneur. Read on below some annotated reading and thoughts per book.

four timeless exploratory books 1

4 timeless exploratory books on my bookshelf


Gargantua


The author

François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance/modern European writer, doctor and Renaissance humanist.

In a nutshell

A timeless novel and literature. Gargantua is a mythical character from 16th-century French literature that François Rabelais created. Gargantua is a truculent giant whose name has come to refer to his enormous and insatiable appetite.

Enjoyed

The family of giants, humour and adventure, foody, appetite and epicurism, the burlesque and the grotesque, Renaissance, a blend between dreams and reality. Storytelling and making portray. Prose and Old French.

Self-reflection

Foodie – I like to visit street food and restaurants, cook and enjoy meals from diverse cultures. Learn more in this post.

One quote from the book

Gargantua made an important speech to the defeated, the troupe, that his opponent, Picrochole, left shamefully. As a humanist sovereign concerned with the long-term preservation of peace, Gargantua gave a speech with seriousness to the defeated and showed his moral greatness and humanism as he avoided the defeated’s humiliation.

“This is the true nature of gratitude. Time gnaws and diminishes all things, but it increases and adds to our good deeds: anytime we have extended a generous hand to a rational human being, that goodness keeps growing and glowing in the man’s heart, forever remembered, constantly contemplated.” in Chapter 50. Gargantua’s Speech To The Vanquished, Book One

Read on more in the book.

Nudge


Do a portrait (in any form) of anyone in your life/in a meeting with you that you care about/value/cherish. Who they are? What are their strengths, superpowers and uniqueness? Then, consider drawing, creating an haïku, poetry or some punchline, and sharing your production within a learning circle.


Soul Mountain


The author

Gao Xingjian is a Chinese-born novelist, playwriter, critic, and painter. He left China for France in 1987 and became French ten years later. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 with this book.

In a nutshell

In 1983, the author was diagnosed with lung cancer and thought he would face death. A second examination revealed he had nothing. In China, he experienced a repressive cultural environment and faced the threat of a spell in prison. That’s why Gao leapt by leaving Beijing and going through an epic voyage of discovery of 15 000 kilometers into the mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in South China. The book is the narration of his travel. A novel that is bold flowing and that goes deep into the human soul with directedness, candour, imagination.

Enjoyed

In a Chinese explorer’s soul, heart and eyes. Travelling through lyrical words of the author in China’s countryside. Wandering through a spiritual experience. Storytelling your journey with depth and lightness, wisdom and modesty.

Self-reflection

One travel in Europe at a time, I have nurtured my love for discovering unknown territories and countries, people, photography, self-discovery and self-knowledge. My curiosity for Asia, especially China, Japan and South Asia, has resurfaced over 2021, focusing on Asia futures, past and present.

Quotes from the book

“Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative.”

 

“At that time the individual did not exist. There was not an awareness of a distinction between “I” and “you”. The birth of I derived from fear of death, and only afterwards an entity which was not I came to constitute you. At that time people did not have an awareness of fearing oneself, knowledge of the self came from an other and was affirmed by possessing and being possessed, and by conquering and being conquered.

He, the third person who is not directly relevant to I and you, was gradually differentiated. After this the I also discovered that he was to be found in large numbers everywhere and was a separate existence from oneself, and it was only then that the consciousness of you and I became secondary. In the individual’s struggle for survival amongst others, the self was gradually forgotten and gradually churned like a grain of sand into the chaos of the boundless universe.”

Read more in the book.

Nudge


Share what you would do with your remote/distributed team if/when you finally all meet in person – in each of your countries/cities/homes. What adventure/experiences would you all share?


In the Savage Country


The author

Shannon Burke is an American novelist and screenwriter.

In a nutshell

A terrific adventure set in the American West of the 1820s narrated in a historical novel. A tale of friendships that goes on a trapping expedition. The book is also a love story between the young trapper William Wyeth and Alene, a strong widow.

Enjoyed

Expedition into the Old American History and countryside. The adventure reveals the nature of individuals’ men, bravery, loyalty, and friendship—Western fiction beyond frontiers.

Self-reflection

Fascinated by social dynamics, American history and cultures. I also dream of travelling in the American countryside one day.

Quote from the book

“That morning the three of us started up into the high mountains and within a few hours were in dense alpine forests dotted with cold blue lakes and bounded by steeply sloping rock walls. We made camp at the prettiest of the high mountain lakes and stayed up in those mountains for two weeks, during which time we hunted and fished and explored the surrounding peaks.

Ferris sketched the land and the trees and the flowers and I scribbled out my impressions from the spring season, taking much care to note my emotions in a way that only a young man can feel is necessary.

And though it was unlikely that there would be any chance to send it, I scribbled out a long letter to Alene, telling her of our take for the first half of the season and of Layton’s glorious feud with Pike, which I was sure would interest her, and made vague references to the initial discord in the brigade that seemed to have faded, though not vanished entirely.

It was strange to write her from that wild and distant place. I knew that my real life and my future were with her, and that she was the single most important person in my life, yet I had not thought of her much over the previous months, and it was only late at night when I felt close to her, or that my mind returned to our life together. I am not saying my heart was not hers, but only noting a curious fact.

When you are on a trapping brigade, engaged in constant struggle with constant danger, it is hard to imagine any other life, and it is easy to forget the civilized world and your connection to it.”

Read more in the book.

Nudge

As you cannot travel abroad due to the pandemic, which alternatives ways – on the ground or online – have you discovered, brought back and enjoyed so far – to travel over the next months/years?

Quiet


The author

Susan Cain is the Quiet Schools Network and the Quiet Leadership Institute’s co-founder, public speaker, and American writer.

In a nutshell

It is a book full of research, observations, and true stories of introverts and how they work, learn, recharge, see themselves and how society sees them.

Enjoyed

Non-fiction. Tons of research. Stories from real people. Actionable insights on balancing introvert and extrovert sides.

Self-reflection

The book helps me to understand one dimension of myself, strength and nature. I see myself as an ambivert through social gatherings and 1-1 meetings, whether online or offline, in live or asynchronous conversation.

Quotes from the book

“The highly sensitive [introverted] tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive. They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions–sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.

Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments–both physical and emotional–unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss–another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.”

 

“So stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don’t let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don’t force yourself to seek breadth. If you prefer single-tasking to multi-tasking, stick to your guns. Being relatively unmoved by rewards gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.”

 

“A Manifesto for Introverts

1. There’s a word for ‘people who are in their heads too much’: thinkers.

2. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.

3. The next generation of quiet kids can and must be raised to know their own strengths.

4. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later.

5. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters.

6. One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.

7. It’s OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.

8. ‘Quiet leadership’ is not an oxymoron.

9. Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.

10. ‘In a gentle way, you can shake the world.’ ~ Mahatma Gandhi”

Read more in the book.

Nudge

If you are in a F2F or remote meeting with your team, network or community members, consider taking ten minutes to be quiet – host and guests included – to reflect and use brainwriting/drawing on this question:

What is the legacy of our gathering/network/organisation/community?

Use a timer and have a timekeeper. Bring a pen, post-it, or a small piece of paper to write down or draw your deep thoughts and insights with the participants and the host when time is up. Then, the host can invite each person to share their ideas or build on each other’s ideas to co-create the small gems of the present and future legacy as people wire together waves after waves of conversation, collaboration and cooperation.

Gratitudes

It was delightful to host and ignite conversations and connections one week, book and activity at a time with fellow explorers from different parts of the world over three grandiose live sessions.

Heartfelt thank you, Klara Loots, Anne Marie Rattray, Jenny Gordon, Trish Wilson and John Granholm, for being part of our continuous great weekly chats and contributing on a variety of topics and activities related to storytelling and portraying, mapping and travelling, leadership and connectedness, self-knowledge and the present and future of our community to name a few.

What are you reading this Summer?


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

READ 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.

Ingenuity x Innovation

Women in Tech Webinar INSEAD Accenture

Source: https://twitter.com/INSEADAlumni/status/1407989495677468675



I attended a TECH TALK X Women in Tech this week with Lucy Cooper – Head of Innovation, Accenture Europe and INSEAD.

“Lucy will share her deep expertise in nurturing growth mindsets, scaling experimentations and developing breakthrough digital products, services and business models. She is also a standout champion for women’s issues, an advocate and mentor for women in technology. Learn from Lucy’s formidable journey from setting up a digital fundraising platform for Y Combinator in Silicon Valley to advising leading clients in Europe on how to transform and innovate by combining disruptive technologies with new business models. The webinar is hosted by Peter Zemsky, Deputy Dean of INSEAD.”

Click below on each theme to read my notes.

Give and lose trust, not earn. Do the company have your back when you work – the whole experience – and even when you are outside the office hours?

Leadership is about perseverance. Leaders need to be in the arena, right beside me. Leaders practitioners. Learn about yourself as a leader.

Carol Dweck on the Growth Mindset with her book ‘Mindset’ – curiosity + courage = top things to have and toughest to do as innovators shakers while having integrity in mind to progress. Trying + learning + progressing with XYZ boss/organization/team.

Learning culture is having curiosity time, low ego, humility, and podcast walking; Worth reading: Tim Ferris’s book: Tools of Titans.

Innovation can include product, strategy, business model design, core business improvement/delivery, and executive change management. What is your innovation agenda? What do you define? What’s the output? Ask questions to know more about the organization’s needs.

Consulting: not settling with the status quo. The on-the-job learning experience with large portfolios and sectors.

“If you aren’t fixing the problem, you are breaking it.”

Solve the problems with all the voices: men and women at the table. Inclusion: enables anyone to speak + Equity: on the same level to contribute + Diversity: sounds the same and different as you, not just look like you. Inclusiveness. Drive cognitive diversity. Work on cognitive bias.

Industry X = Manufacturing futures with automation, AI & data. Just think of how the vaccines came out. Game-changers to watch out for Lucy: suppliers and energy in the Nordics, L’Oréal. Life science industry: illness, health to treat better people. All those organizations put data at the core of everything they do.

Did you enjoy this post? Check out Future Skills.

Following up this write-up in the futures thinking blog series. This post is related to the online certified course ‘‘Life After COVID-19: Get Ready for our Post-Pandemic Future‘ hosted by Jane McGonigal.

She invited fellow futurists to gain clarity on ‘Action For Transformation’.

Project Title

Now-proofing your skills

Pattern From the Past

MIT and the World Economic Forum have identified an urgent global need to reskill and upskill the workforce. But are companies, educational institutions and large consultancies failing to support people who are not in control of the system to fix their skills for the now – for distributed working and learning (working from anywhere and learning from anywhere)?

Innovation for the Future

Any worker from anywhere and any discipline can develop and improve remote and distributed work/learning skills through the 40-day online workshop facilitated by Harold Jarche, with an international cohort and host, on-demand coaching and a global community of practice, The Perpetual Beta Coffee Club, after completing the workshop one week at a time. There is also my list of global communities on the future of work/learning/community/leadership that may be of interest to you.

Action for Transformation

My participation in the distributed work skills workshop with a global cohort makes me realize the importance of sharing reflections and lessons learned, work and learning in progress – out loud through a blog post series, the #PKMastery Series, a future skills map, and global community conversations on working and learning in a networked society.

Make a micro-plan

“What could you do in your own “first 5 minutes” to get this work underway, right now?” ~ Jane McGonigal, IFTF

Frequent use and review of the Future Work Skills 2020 map in the IFTF report to quickly assess each skill on a scale of 1 to 5 to create my own state of distributed work and learning skills, share it in a conversation with a peer, activate my strengths on my own, in any teams, networks and communities.

iftf future work skills map rotana ty

Source: https://www.iftf.org/futureworkskills


Go Further

Read and use: Potential and conversational.

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