No matter how hard you try to have a dynamic, interactive feeling to a workshop, if you are in a room where the furniture is all facing forward and bolted to the floor, people’s assumptions are that they are there to sit still and listen, and not to look at each other and talk. We […]
This strikes me as a rather explosive question, and it would be interesting to hear different viewpoints. Several years ago I think I would not have considered it as plausible as I do today. Formal networks now are competing with personal networks that people set up for themselves, both social and professional. Why join a […]
This is the new corporate ad that our organization has developed – I was so excited to see that out of the 8 words chosen so carefully to profile our organization, “Learning” was one! The tagline at the bottom is also interesting: “Bringing experts together to help solve our most pressing sustainable development challenges”. Earlier […]
For many bloggers, keeping up their blog is a vocation. They are completely devoted to keeping their blog warm, talk about it incessantly, obsess over their statistics, and celebrate when people comment on their posts. The only thing that can possibly keep a blogger away from her blog is perhaps…….vacation, vacation, vacation!
Last week we went to a fantastic workshop on gaming given by one of the gurus in this field, Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan, whom we have mentioned before in a previous blog post (“Bingo!”) . His website on Improving Performance Playfully, is a wealth of free games, interactive training exercises and ideas for trainers and facilitators. […]
I heard a great idea yesterday from the founder/owner of an innovative Dutch technology firm. He wanted to create an experiential learning opportunity for himself, the head of the business for nearly 20 years, so he organized a “Boss swap” with a friend in another company. For three days, he swapped roles with another CEO […]
Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post (Experience in a Box) about an interesting kit of materials that could be used to help people move through their learning cycle, from “analysis” to “experimenting”, by building and simulating their ideas. I used this on Thursday in our in-house Facilitator’s Training Course (Module 4: Working with […]
In the last couple of days, I have been working with a core team in our institution on a strategic planning process to structure and organize a major upcoming event – a Congress of 10,000 people which will be held at the end of next year. We spent a good deal of our 14.5 hours […]
This week we went to a meeting of a Swiss-based Knowledge Management Community of Practice called “Think Table”. This one-day gathering was packed full of games, experiences, discussions on topics such as storytelling (Story Guide: Building Bridges Using Narrative Techniques” prepared by the Swiss Development Cooperation-their webpage has many other related free documents to download), […]
This title might sound like the start of a self-help entry, and in some ways it is. We have written a few blog posts in the past about seeing information as flow (rather than a stock). These posts included How is Information Like Electricity or Water? and Knowledge Has Changed: 6 Big Ideas from George […]
We have been on the giving and receiving end of feedback recently and that has inspired us to think a bit more about this artful communication process. How can we give feedback that people can actually hear, and even potentially use as a part of their learning process? A couple of questions come to mind […]
Today we are celebrating – in the last 7 months we have written 100 blog posts! What is this practice contributing to our work? Here are some of the things that we have identified… Making Space for Reflective Practice – Many people say they are too busy to think or be creative. For us blogging […]
In a previous post, How is Change Like Strip Poker, we talked through how people react to change processes, and we used a game for experiential learning. See that post if you want to know the mechanics of the game. The basic idea is to have people experience a change process and notice what kind […]
I was interested to hear last week, from the Regional HR Director at Dupont, that for many companies the virtual office is now the norm and that companies are turning their attention to helping employees maintain connectivity, not only of the technical kind but also of the interpersonal kind. This may be the case for […]
Earlier this week we ran an interesting activity in our Staff Meeting. Staff Meetings have changed in the last month, with the request from the Director General (formerly in charge of staff meetings) that they be facilitated by Communications and Learning. ( Perhaps this falls into the Be Careful What You Wish For category – […]
Blogging seems to be slowly coming into our daily conversations at work as people start to experiment, and open up to the power of this tool. In our discussions we have seen some very different reactions to the notion of blogs by people at different levels of our international institution. In some of our conversations […]
This post was contributed by Caroline, a member of our Learning Team, and today our guest blogger. She writes about a recent strategic planning meeting we held to develop our main programme goals for the next four years. She writes… In the first morning of our 3-day meeting, 25 people gathered for the first time […]
After a little tangle of events yesterday around our drive to bring back free coffee, the advice of Yoda somehow came through it all, “There is no try, there is only do”, and so we went for it. Although I feel a bit sheepish about quoting a film character, and a Star Wars one to […]
Today I did not follow this sequence in the right order. I was in a hurry, I had tasks queued up, very little time between them, and lots of people depending on me to deliver and get to the next meeting place on time. So what did I do? I put a full tank of […]
We are here this week at a strategic planning meeting for a major group affiliated with our organization. We have started having interesting side conversations one of which is about the trend for blogging and how some major businesses have been encouraging all staff members to set up blogs. Apparently Microsoft has over 1000 bloggers […]
We hear a lot about the digital divide between northern and southern countries, but we know deep down that the real digital divide lays somewhere in that fuzzy expanse between 18 and 40 years of age. Somewhere between those who were born digital and who are discovering digital. In the last few days in Egypt […]
Lizzie and I are here at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Library of Alexandria), in Egypt with our colleague Rania, who works in our Amman office. We are here planning a workshop on new learning (formal and informal) for sustainable development in the Arab region this September. We are going to be inviting some Universities who are […]
This week Lizzie and I are at a workshop on livelihoods and landscapes, which is being hosted by one of our organization’s largest programmes. We have 50 participants from all over the world, and to start our introductions in an interactive, exciting way, we decided to structure a “Speed Meeting” activity. In this activity, each […]
As I mentioned in my previous post, I attended a workshop on Group Process Consultation (GPC) this week. During the many hours we spent together (some days from 08:30 – 21:00!) we discussed many theories, models, books and resources related to group processes, teams and learning. I wanted to take a moment to capture some […]
At the moment, I am at an NTL (National Training Laboratory) course on Group Process Consultation. We are learning about how to use this technique to help groups guide themselves to be more effective in their group processes. It is different than pure “facilitation” in that the Group Process Consultant (GPC) doesn’t do any of […]
At the GAN-Net workshop in any one conversation we manage to go from the personal level (even cellular sometimes) to the global level. Yesterday in our group we had a thought-provoking discussion about teams which did just that. Overall we are looking at how to improve the impacts of these Global Action Networks in the […]
For the next few days I am attending a meeting of GAN-Net outside of Boston. A GAN is a Global Action Network and the people attending the workshop come from organizational development, knowledge management, human development and related fields. These few days we are discussing the structure, strategy and governance systems of Global Action Networks […]
We are just about to move our Learning Team into a new office space in the building and are determined not to keep any (or the absolute minimum) of paper files and documents. If we really believe that information is a flow then how can we focus our energies on building our capacities finding just-in-time/up-to-date […]
I have not lost total faith in formal training or workshops as learning delivery tools; Jay Cross’ comments to the last blog post have also confirmed that every tool has its appropriate use (and every learner his/her own learning preference). I would also say that training has become less and less “formal” over the years. […]
The blog has been a little slow lately as we have entered an intense period of travel. The upside to this is that long flights are great places to read and think (and a much more pleasant environment for this than the emergency room…) On my flight yesterday I began reading Howard Gardner‘s book Changing […]
A few days ago I received a thought provoking and relevant article from one of my colleagues who is in a very different department than I am. She is in such a different part of our organization’s work, in fact, that I probably would not have been on her radar screen normally, except that we […]
Which is more sustainable? * A cotton diaper (nappy) OR a disposable nappy?* A diesel compact car OR a Prius? * A compact fluorescent light bulb OR a regular light bulb? The answer is…we don’t know – it depends on what you do with them. Nothing is intrinsically sustainable or not. You can easily leave […]
If you could design your perfect Learnscape, what would it look like? We are in the process of putting together plans for a new building for our institution. We would love to have a purpose-built learnscape included in these plans. This would be a flexible learning space that would represent our institution’s learning and sustainability […]
I had a powerful reframing opportunity today as I sat for 7 hours in the Emergency Room waiting to see the doctor that would eventually give me 6 injections and as many stitches in my big toe due to a freak flipchart accident in my home today. Trying to put a new flipchart together, with […]
When you coordinate a network, or a community of practice, it is always hard to know how much information to send through to people, be it on a listserve or an e-newsletter, or a number of other tools. Should it be just a little bit, or maybe none, with everything going on a portal that […]
I recently heard a wonderful story retold from a book called “Landmarks” by Margaret Silf. In this story a woman is hiking late one afternon in the Welsh hill country when a storm blows in upon her. As she nears a barren peak, the wind starts to gale and storm clouds begin to boil in […]
Imagine that you were going to develop a new Learning Programme for your organization – what would be its purpose? What features would it have? Who would it target and what would it like to help them achieve? (Is it all about Them or is it all about Us? Or maybe we want to learn […]
Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a management workshop that had been organized after our full week of meetings and I found it incredibly valuable in terms of new insights and learning. For one, it allowed me to meet my colleagues out of a workplace context (even though it was held at our workplace.) […]
Yesterday afternoon we had a workshop on a new leadership initiative within our organization in order to bring renewed energy to the idea and generate some useful information which could be used for the next stage of programme design. In the opening activity we each interviewed a partner about how they like to learn, and […]
On Day 2 of our Fixed Meeting Week, we had a fascinating session on the “Future of Sustainability” that featured a speaker from China, an economist currently working for a UN agency in Geneva, who spoke to us about China and how its government and 1.3 billion people are approaching sustainability. You cannot pick up […]
