GROUPTROUP*TROMPTRAMPTRAMSTEAMS I couldn’t believe that this worked, on my first go, after reading Brian Remer’s puzzle instructions in this month’s Thiagi Gameletter (TGL-Seriously fun activities for trainters, facilitators, performance consultants, and managers). Brian calls this instructional puzzle a “Doublet”, and cites Lewis Carroll (of Alice fame) as its originator. In Brian’s description of this puzzle […]
I am currently in the middle of an online sustainability learning project that includes facilitating a number of webinars (10 to be exact) for a big multi-national company with staff based all over the world. For this project, I am one of a distributed delivery team from AtKisson Associates which is located in North America, […]
I have just finished writing the report for a very interesting study aimed at a reconceptualising a large organization’s Training Division into a Learning Division, and exploring what that might mean for its structure, task orientation, skill sets, and correlated processes and policies. It was a fascinating exercise in both retrofitting and growing new functionality […]
I am writing what’s turning out to be a very long report that’s thinking about the evolution of training into learning. And I’m very much enjoying the late night research part, which flicks me serendipitiously through many of the grainy midnight channels of the World Wide Web, as well as into some brighter and more […]
The title of the next Chief Learning Officer Webinar I’ve signed up for is called, “Corporate Learning in 2010: Social, Mobile, Collaborative, Engaging and Fun.” I was interested to find an example of this – of how informal learning at the organizational level can be just that – here near Geneva last week. I had […]
Some people ask for examples of how systems thinking can be applied. Here’s a story that I came across recently… Imagine you are a headquarters-based training unit in a big organization and, among other things, you put out a two-page newsletter each month that features short paragraphs describing all the different training activities that the […]
I was not too sure about this until I watched a YouTube video that helped me do something I had never done before (make a video with my computer’s integrated webcam to post on my blog), now I think YouTube is going to give technical training, at least, a run for its money…I might have […]
Just published by Fast Future is a study commissioned by the UK Government’s Science: So What? So Everything campaign on the Shape of Jobs to Come . The study produced a list of 20 jobs for 2030, which I thought I would share because Rohit Talwar, from Fast Future, keynoted at the International Association of […]
Tweet version:Dry topic? Make a GAME: Take topic, identify behaviour desired, make game to practice (team it, test it, time it), add drama, give prizes! Imagine you have what might otherwise be a dry topic, like sharing a complicated membership application process (not that some people won’t find this exhilarating, of course). As exciting as […]
Like cobblers kids, do Knowledge Workers kids get no time? (This rather bleak thought has been haunting me since I Tweeted it last week, I’m hoping posting will exorcise it – or maybe it’s better as a New Year’s resolution not to work so much!)
I have been spending the last weeks at my desk developing a shared “curriculum” for a trio of sustainability leadership development programmes in different parts of Africa. I find myself writing about activities that help people make impact in their contexts and communities, and about how to take ideas from rhetoric to behaviour change. That’s […]
Thanks to the BBC for a slightly odd, but very environmentally-message friendly holiday video! PS: And just to make more of a learning object out of this (e.g. more than learning that squirrels can play the saxophone), this is the first time I have embedded a video into blog post, much easier than I thought […]
The recent Online Educa International Conference on Technology Supported Learning and Training featured a stream of fascinating workshops in and around informal learning that was organized and facilitated by Jay Cross (author of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance.) I attended a number of the workshops in this stream, that […]
Many people do not see the point of Twitter. I know this because I counted myself as a proud member of this large, non-plussed group until a few days ago. We had followed the hype and set up an account, followed some people (quickly stopped following some people), Tweeted a few times to see how […]
I just spent the last two days at Online Educa, one of the largest global conferences for technology-supported learning and training, held annually in Berlin. It is my third time attending and every time I return full of new ideas and a glimpse at the future learning trends through the eyes of some of the […]
Learning can be a useful accelerator for the work you do. It can help keep you motivated, let you experience your progress in a different way, keep you engaged with wider processes. So how can you build more learning into your work life? As a learning practitioner, I asked myself this question, and here is […]
Many of us go to hours, days, even weeks of meetings and workshops as a part of our working life. Then when we return home have the added pleasure of trying to remember what happened and what we agreed to do. Thankfully many of us also have developed good systems for tracking our next actions […]
Time is like snow. It’s all made of the same stuff – minutes for time, or water in the snow case – but it takes so many different forms. Did you know there was a Field Guide to Snowflakes? (over 35 different kinds!) I want to write the Field Guide to Time. I never noticed […]
I just spent a worthwhile 30 minutes reading Brenda Bence’s, “The Top 10 Branding Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make”. Since I went independent in June this year I’m still getting my head around many aspects of what it means to work independently. I thought this was a useful set of points for newly independent workers to consider […]
All week I have been working with a mixed Private Sector/ Not-for-Profit group (the latter from one conservation organization) in a joint learning exercise about partnerships between these two different sectors. It was structured in an interesting way, the first two days were internal to the conservation organization, with headquarters staff joined with their regional […]
Last night I participated in an excellent webinar run by Chief Learning Officer Magazine called “Metrics of the Modern CLO: Measuring Formal and Informal Learning“. (CLO offers a great series of free learning webinars, by the way, see the archived version of this webinar here.) The speaker was Josh Bersin, and he spoke about three […]
Last week I was asked to facilitate a conference call. Sound odd? Well, originally it was supposed to be a face-to-face meeting on sustainability reporting for a high-level company review panel. In its first iteration it had two people conferencing in from distant time zones. That meant we had to design activities that the participants […]
For an event that combines product designers, technology experts and policy makers, you want to move into as many innovative “integrative” spaces as possible. That takes buy-in from all parties, as well as lots of courage! On Tuesday, the second day of a 2-day international conference on sustainable products and services in Essen, Germany, we […]
I am way behind in my blogging, mostly because I have been completely obsessed with another blog – one I set up in July for my Father that is not as different as I had imagined from this blog on Learning. The topics are very different, his blog (Outdoors with Martin) is about squirrel hunting, […]
In January of this year I wrote a blog post called The Return of the Age of Education, where I wondered if the kick one gets from acquiring stuff could be replaced by that from acquiring knowledge. Effectively, could personal growth replace economic growth? Can acquiring knowledge replace acquiring things? (For example, I was going […]
The annual Balaton Group Meeting, featuring from 8-12 fascinating speakers in the morning formal programme, and anywhere from 15-25 parallel afternoon sessions in the Open Space portion of the meeting, is always full of provocative ideas. I captured a number of them here, made by some of our speakers including Dennis Meadows, Bert de Vries, […]
Each year for 28 years, the Balaton Group has met on the shores of Lake Balaton, Hungary to discuss sustainability issues, systems dynamics, and global change. This year’s meeting is focused on “Frontiers of Sustainable Development” and I have decided to try to blog the various meeting inputs. These follow…
Vision fatigue? Many groups involved in change processes over time claim they just can’t do another visioning process. They have done it so many times. What is a creative way to engage this kind of group? Instead of trying to design their process, why not design an inquiry process where they do the fundamentals of […]
Imagine you and another trainer got together and could dream up your perfect training centre. What are some of the things that you would avoid, that have driven you crazy in the past, in various hotels and conference centres around the world? Heavy or fixed furniture, poorly lit rooms, carpeted walls, struggles getting one more […]
This morning I am helping to team deliver a day-long systems thinking module as a part of this week’s Isis Academy (AtKisson Associates), a leadership programme for sustainability practitioners being held outside of Stockholm. Systems can be complex for some people, so we are starting with an introduction by Alan AtKisson, sustainability expert, author and […]
A major cross-cultural collision occurred at the end of a recent multi-stakeholder dialogue I was facilitating. The offending word: Report. In the final feel-good stretches of a dynamic multi-sectoral, heretofore generative dialogue, progress screamed to a halt when this six letter word was uttered. The precipitating question, expected to be purely rhetorical – Can we […]
I wrote a post in March about learning through repetition, versus intense bursts of learning – so the benefits of 15 minutes of Spanish a day for 2 years versus the same amount of time in a one-month intensive each summer. This apparently deepens your neural grooves and helps you really learn something (See para […]
Imagine you are using an amazing venue for an upcoming, interactive conference of around 200 people (or any number for that matter), and you are visiting it for the first time. What would you want to know? Imagine that the venue is not a purpose-built conference centre, but something like a World Heritage Site, a […]
What kind of motivation does a trainer need to liberate herself from an unweildly PowerPoint slide set? What about the above – might that work for you too? Last Wednesday in London I delivered a systems thinking module for LEAD Europe Cohort 14 (I was the Director of Capacity Development at LEAD International for 6 […]
A week or so ago (time marker), I spent the day in London (place marker) with Shawn Callahan from Anecdote, an innovative storytelling group from Australia, in a full day learning session called “Storytelling for business leaders”. Let’s say I wanted to tell you about my day. I could write down a list of things […]
I’m facilitating a Partners Assembly today in Brussels, and I’m awake early going over my agenda – the flow, the segue ways, the objectives and outcomes that we want overall and from each of our sessions. I need to know this agenda inside and out, and I realise that this is a lot about confidence. […]
It is ok to be intolerant of intolerance?
Can you go too far with experiential learning? This is learning by doing, as opposed to learning by more passive means (listening to a speaker, watching TV, etc.) Experiential learning has the potential to get deeper, be more memorable, to create an experience or a learning moment that you can draw on or act upon […]
Tonight I spoke at the Geneva Forum for Social Change on a panel called, “The Power of One: Individual Choices Affecting Environmental Change.” It followed and riffed off of a film which was shown just prior to the panel discussion called, Garbage Warrior, about Mike Reynolds decades long fight to give architecture and building a […]
This morning I was surprised with another Mother’s Day present – a game called “Coconut Cracker” which my 8 year old had created for me. The essence of the game was that you had to toss a pencil onto a small piece of paper (a post-it note). On the post-it note were drawn nine small […]
