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Next Steps for GTD and Zero In-Box: Learning About Life in (or with) a System

I received a wonderful present in the post today – a whole set of Getting Things Done (GTD) products -a fond memory of David Allen’s visit to our organization earlier this year. I am a bit of an organization and productivity freak – so this was like a kid getting candy in the mail. Of course there was only one of everything, should I keep it all for myself?

I had been using the GTD system at home for about a year when I changed over my office, set up my folders, swapped my bound notebooks for tear-off note pads, and so on. That process worked, combined with Merlin Mann’s Zero-In box (make sure to watch the video), and then even my email started to make me happy. No longer do 600+ half-read emails wait for me on Monday mornings. Of course, I fall out of step from time to time (especially when I travel), but for the most part I can keep my email in-box at zero, and manage all the little pieces of paper and notes that magically turn up. I do my weekly monitoring (a la GTD), I don’t lose anything (I might of course choose to ignore it), and I am finally in control of all the stuff that comes in and out of my office every day.

It is a little frightening knowing exactly what you need to do, you get very calm. Too calm. People think you don’t have enough to do because you are not running around looking harried and overwhelmed. On Step 1 (logical stuff containment system) and Step 2 (taming email dragon) of my plan to boost productivity and achieve a zen-like relationship with the workplace – mission accomplished. Ah, but like any good learning process, this is not the end of the story, even if it is where the books and videos end.

Once you get your act together, Step 3 is to find tolerance, for others and yourself. Now other people’s email and information overload becomes very obvious. You can almost immediately tell who has a system and who doesn’t. However, because your situation is now so different it is very hard to remember what it was like to literally swim (or drown) in email and paper. Of course, when you do have a system, procrastination becomes deliberate and transparent, and you can tell what you don’t want to do or can’t really get your head around (so figuratively, your management underpants are showing.) In Step 3, to further lower stress levels, you are desparately seeking tolerance – nobody’s perfect.

Finally (at least finally for now), Step 4 is to spread the word. As evangelical as that might sound, this is indeed the next logical step. At one point in the acid rain problem of the 1980s, Sweden decided that it would have more impact in Sweden with its anti-pollution investments if it would simply send the money and technology to Poland. When my “Waiting for” folder has more items than my “Action” folder, then I need to step out of my bubble and change tactics. I can send reminders, I can call, I can chase, but that just adds back in work to a process that, if I was the Master of my Universe, would have been done.

I can get my things done, but ultimately most of my things depend on other people getting their things done. So, on to Steps 3 and 4 and those unwritten chapters. Aaaah, life in a system.

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Micro-Lit: Too Wordy – Try It Again

My previous blog post on this topic was ridiculously long, especially for the topic. So I am trying again:

Micro-Lit is the latest trend – the ultimate in pithy reductive literature. Why write a book when 6 words will do?

What ideas might this trend give us for our learning work? What about asking for thoughtful abbreviated responses to feedback questions? Avoid long qualitative anwers and boost creativity. Introduce synthesizing exercises for useful skills building. E.g. Pick one word that summarises how you’re feeling right now? Or let small groups create a 1 sentence review of a speaker’s presentation, rather than a 10 min summary report back. Recapitulate the previous day with a haiku. You get the idea: Multiply meaning and minimize words.

Think short and come up with the perfect triple entendre.

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Trendspotting: Micro-Lit (and Other Applications)

We are coming up to our major Congress, now two weeks away, and working on our assessment instruments among other things. We feel keen to gather as much data, information and feedback as possible from the thousands of participants attending to help us learn more about them, their ideas and opinions, and to make decisions about future work and future Congresses. But what are we going to do with all that information?

Lizzie and I spoke yesterday with our Monitoring & Evaluation officer about a draft feedback form for participants attending the set of 54 Learning Opportunities (skills building workshops) that will be held on site. We asked everything we were interested in in an innovative way, so that the form was a learning intervention in itself, helped people tap in on what they were learning and practiced summarising it for people (e.g. If you met a colleague in the corridor on your way out of this workshop, what would you tell them that you learned?) Our M&E colleague usefully pointed out that our questionnaire was mostly qualitative and would generate reams of results that would be time consuming and costly to crunch. Did we want to think of a few ways of getting high quality and more importantly shorter responses?

Yesterday we received an email from a former colleague and fellow blogger, Michelle, asking for an activity to help teach the skills of synthesizing and making summaries which she could use in a communications course she was giving. We had never really done that and it struck me as a challenge; synthesizing is indeed an essential knowledge management skill, useful for everyone. How can we help people take lots of information and crystallize the most essential elements for themselves and others?

I read a recent article on the new trend for Micro-lit, which is both an art form in itself and a practice of using just a few words to synthesize, what in otherwords, would take many other words. This has been inspired by the oft-cited 6 word novel that Hemingway wrote on a dare: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Now there are 4 word film reviews, 12-word novel contests, etc. The trend must be a backlash from today’s information overload, as well as people’s increasing comfort writing text messages, using Skype Chat, Twitter etc. People are getting better at saying a lot with just a few words.

So how can we take advantage of this – well, for our assessment we decided to ask people a few questions in a different way, such as “What 5 words would you use to describe this learning opportunity?”, and for Michelle, I suggested a couple of synthesis activities, such as writing a Haiku that summarizes a session participants had earlier in the training (I’ve had participants write systems haikus), or to pick an article out of the newspaper and write a one sentence review. Or what about a 6 word bio for yourself?

As writers, bloggers, trainers, facilitators, and colleagues the words we generate compete with the steady flow of information that sweeps through our lives. We need to think more about the other end of that information production process – to what others can do with that information – and to help them out a little by synthesizing our selves, and potentially helping them to do it too through the questions we ask.

So why is this blog post so long? Maybe I should have written a 5 word blog post instead:

Think more and write less.

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The Golden Rule

We have been to two local network meetings this week – one for trainers and one for facilitators working in the Geneva area. We go to meet people, to contribute something and to learn about the particular topic they are discussing. Last night at the facilitators network meeting we created an interesting taxonomy of icebreakers and introduction exercises, organized by application (group size and level of formality needed). At the trainers meeting we had a demonstration of the power of people’s energy fields- both the impact of your (positive/negative) thoughts on you and on others around you.

At these meetings, I also find myself learning something about these fields of practice more generally, through observing how the community members talk to each other, how they model their messages in demonstrating skills and knowledge to each other.

One thing beamed out at me this week. In these professions, there are some golden rules. One of the most important ones, one which sounds simple but is incredibly subtle, I believe, is: Be nice.

Whether you are facilitating or training, when people come together for any purposeful reason, you can be sure that in addition to their pens and papers, they bring with them a range of powerful emotions. They could be curious, excited, exasperated, stressed, bored, or all of these things at once; and you, as their process leader, get to create an experience for these people as individuals and together that works with all those feelings.

Whether you use facilitation or training as a blunt instrument or a fine tool, everything going on in that room is precipitated or mediated by you. As you feed back and summarise, it is also filtered by you. As you guide and build the process, it is directed by you. How people feel at the beginning, middle and end, is somehow affected by you. Where are you? Standing at the front or side of the room, moving in and out of their line of sight? What are you doing while that person is speaking, are you grimacing, talking to someone else, asking hard questions, smiling, affirming, paying complete attention. Are you modelling the behaviour that you want others to have in your session?

We want to walk into a room of nice people. We ask people to open up and dig deeply inside themselves for ideas, answers and questions. We ask people to stretch, to nudge themselves out of their comfort zone to learn and experience behaviour change. One of our responsibilities surely in intervening in these processes is to bring our good will and good intent, and leave aside everything else, but our genuine desire to help others. I really think one of the golden rules for process leaders is: Be nice. Be deeply and genuinely nice. And I think everyone can feel it when its there. I am thinking about what that means for me – think about what that means for you.

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It’s a Sign!


You’ve heard of reading tea leaves – well, look what tea bags can do. It’s going to be a good week!

(10 min later) Ok, apparently it is not immediately obvious (to my husband at least) what this is – it’s a smiley face! Can you see it? If this was a Rorschach blot, I hope it would say good things about me.

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Working By Walking Around

In the last 2 days, I have hand delivered three letters in my office building. I think that is the first time I have ever done that. But these days it is an absolute necessity. Our office is a little crazy right now (I wanted to call this blog entry “Going Postal” but with the stress levels right now it did not seem very p.c..) We are 3 weeks away from the opening of our enormous Congress, almost entirely run by and for people in our Union (staff, partners, and members alike). People’s email boxes are overflowing, their phones are on voicemail, meetings overlap, schedules are triple booked, questions and requests are flying in from all corners of the world. Time is precious. I had a 4 minute meeting today which actually accomplished something important. I am assured that this is completely normal just before one of our huge four-yearly Congresses.

What it means is that people are having to work very differently, which might not be a bad thing. If I need something now, information or a decision or someone’s attention, (like my 3 invitations to speak at workshops), I need to get off my chair and go out of my office and physically find them. Sometimes they are at their desks, sometimes coming out of meetings, sometimes ducking into the ladies or heading out for a smoke, where ever they are, I need to find them. Because in 5 minutes we have discussed, informed or solved something that would otherwise go into an action file and re-emerge in a week or a month (or never). No time for that now.

Actually I am enjoying this new mode of working. I get to see people, talk for a minute, learn about their latest whatever. I am getting to hear more about what people are doing, their hopes, goals and sometimes frustrations. I can even help at times which is very satisfying. Like the postman in the old days where I grew up – he walked around door to door, chatted with people, knew what was going on in the neighbourhood, and was always willing to exchange a few words or give some friendly advice. I think that this way of working helps reduce stress, pulls the community together, builds relationships, and fosters informal learning. There is something deliciously counterintuitive about this way of working (I am too busy to send a 2 minute email and wait for a response. Instead I’m going to take a 10 minute walk to get what I need.)

I remember reading an article about the workplace of the future (which is now) suggesting that the ONLY reason to come into an office today was to interact. At home, people have all the equipment they need to work – online access to intranets, skype, Instant Messenger, and more. So if you are not in the office to interact with colleagues, you might as well work from home. There, your only interuption might be the postman.

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It Only Takes 1% to Make A Micro-Trend

If we have 1500 staff members, what are 15 of them doing together that creates an interesting micro-trend in our organization that we should be paying attention to?

I enjoyed reading Mark J. Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne’s Micro Trends: Surprising Tales of the Way We Live Today (Penguin 2007), and found this intriguing paragraph to capture the essence of the book:

Today, changing lifestyles, the Internet, the balkanization of communications, and the global economy are all coming together to create a new sense of individualism that is powerfully transforming our society. The world may be getting flatter, in terms of globalization, but it is occupied by 6 billion little bumps who do not have to follow the herd to be heard. … In fact by the time a trend hits 1 percent , it is ready to spawn a hit movie, best selling book, or new political movement. The power of individual choice is increasingly influencing politics, religion, entertainment and even war. In today’s mass societies, it takes only 1 percent of people making a dedicated choice – contrary to the mainstream’s choice – to create a movement that can change the world.

…or an organization? I have the exciting challenge to facilitate a four-year, system-wide organizational development and change process in my organization. Many teams will be involved in this evolving process. At this early stage we are thinking about how best to inform and engage people so that they see and feel their own potential to catalyse change in their areas of concern. I have been thinking about how to get the majority on board, but reading this book makes me think that, in fact, there may be no “majority” in the organization. Maybe, just like in the outside world, as MicroTrends proposes, people are going hundreds of small directions at once, quickly.

So how can we harness that energy for this process? Where are the niches within the organization? Maybe trying to unify people around one macro-slogan, tagline, or end point, is not the most effective way to go. Maybe we need to make lots of customised, personalised products and processes that speak to and build tolerance for the different choices that people are making (like going to staff picnics and not going to staff picnics, or coming to free coffee or not coming to free coffee.) The book talks not so much about identifying Communities of Practice, but Communities of Choice.

We need to start micro-trend spotting – what are those 15 people doing right now?

Watch Mark Penn’s GoogleTalks Video on YouTube.

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Avoiding Petrifying Talk of ‘Taking Action’

How can we talk about applying learning without turning off those who are petrified by talk of taking action? This challenge leapt out and stared me in the face last week.

When we take time to interact with business people on the topic of business and biodiversity, we hope that they will be energized and better equipped with what they learn to return to their businesses and lead change. But leading change requires taking action. And talk of taking action… well, apparently this isn’t something that energizes everyone; Quite the opposite. So what did we come up with? – A series of appreciative questions which imply taking action, but don’t explicitly state so.

• Is your business strategy more focused on addressing biodiversity risks or opportunities?
• What more could your business do to mitigate the biodiversity risks and/or capitalize on the opportunities?
• If your CEO asked you for one suggestion on how to improve your business’ biodiversity strategy, what would you suggest?

The room buzzed. Suggestions sprung to the surface. And lively conversation continued into dinner, with learning translated into fresh ideas for leading change!

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Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in 50 Words

I just spent my Saturday morning filling in a 6-page questionnaire sent by UNESCO as a part of their global monitoring and evaluation of the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). They want to know what organizations and networks are doing to contribute to the Decade, here at the mid-decade mark.

The question I appreciated the most was: What is Education for Sustainable Development for you? (Give your perception of ESD in 50 words.) It was the 50 words that got me, now that was a challenge! Because the Decade is a United Nations process (it is a UN Decade), with all the reams of paperwork, pages and column inches that brings, I found this question both refreshing and intriguing. It was an exercise that tapped into to my right brain creativity that was not unlike writing a poem or a haiku. It generated a little spark of energy where before there was only a 6-page questionnaire. And it was the last question – good thinking on someone’s part!

Here was my response:

ESD is the process of helping individuals and groups deliberately define their own SD journeys, supporting this through learning tools, collaborative opportunities and reflective processes. ESD shapes people’s viewpoint on their personal and professional experiences so that decisions that favour sustainability become a part of their habitual and desired practice.

Want to try one of your own? See if thinking about it this way, like a puzzle, ignites some renewed energy – after all we have 5 years to go!

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The 10 Commandments of Panel Sessions

See Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog for “10 Commandments of Panel Sessions”. This post seemed particularly relevant for what we are about to do at our upcoming Congress in 4 weeks – that is, hear lots of panel discussions. These strike me as sensible ways to steer panels so that they do what they are meant to do (which I guess is to present a lot of information to a lot of people in a short amount of time.) Learning should also be a top goal, and I think following these “commandments” will get us a little closer to that one.

Thanks to my colleague Wiebke in our Brussels Office for sending this along (fyi she also keeps a blog, on “perpetual learning and other pathways to peace”.)

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The Forum’s Many Faces

I have mentioned before in this blog the Learning Capture process that our institution is undertaking in the months prior to, during, and after our upcoming World Conservation Congress (October 2008). I use the blog to answer some of the questions – this is question four: Reflecting on the process of designing and coordinating the Forum, what aspects were successful and could become part of the process for the next Forum? What aspects of the process are, in hindsight, not essential, redundant, or simply did not work?

When I think of the issues I am dealing with right now, coordinating a Facilitation Team for the Forum (a four day mega-event with hundreds of parallel workshops, activities, cinema, etc.), I imagine the kind of questions I might have asked many months ago that might have mitigated some of the work I am doing now. I see an opportunity for next time (we do these events each four years) that is worth mentioning around the venue selection process.

As I am working with the facilitation side of things, I would start with the same kinds of questions in this situation that I would ask of anyone organizing any activity: What is the purpose of the event? Once that was established, I would ask: How can we model our goals in our methodology? So that people get both an intellectual experience and a kinesthetic experience (that’s our left brain/right brain issue again) that grounds it firmly in participants’ life experience (at least for longer than 90 minutes.) My next question would be: What kind of a venue do we need to do this?

That would be the question sequence from my perspective. Another perspective might come from a thematic organizer – I want to get this great message out to as many people as possible – how big are the rooms and do we have translation? Or from a logistics person – how good is the venue staff – am I going to have to do everything myself, or are they really well organized? Or from an admin person – is the venue too big that I am going to have to run from one event to another and is my office near where the action is? Or from a participant – am I going to be sitting all day listening to people talk – are the chairs comfortable and is there a place I can get a coffee? Or from a facilitator – I need to involve people, are the chairs moveable, can we post things on the walls, is there open space I can use for games or activities?

Compromises might need to be made of course (hopefully not too many), however, far upstream of such an event, a useful checklist (a Reusable Learning Object) can be made of the needs and perspectives of the people that will bring such an event to life, followed by clear communication of the decisions taken. This would be an interesting way to involve those people in the very first stages of the process. Maybe the advance team, visiting the venue options early on, could invoke them in their visits – can they take a handful of masks? The organizer mask, the staff mask, the facilitator mask, the participant mask – and see it through their eyes?

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Workshop in a Box

Lizzie and I recently ran a 2.5 day visioning workshop using systems thinking tools in Meso-America in Spanish (see recent blog post: Want more amplification: Don’t call it training) without ever formally taking the floor. We did the design work and preparation, consulted pre-event with our local partners, and attended the workshop, and left the on stage facilitation to two fantastic regional experts. The workshop ran beautifully – it popped out, perfectly formed (to participants).

Of course, behind the scenes it took lots of work. Having a terrific delivery team is obviously the first big step, and we had that with our remarkable Mexican and Argentinian bi-lingual facilitators (you would never have imagined that they first met only the day before the workshop). The second is airtight preparation and process documentation. It’s on this latter that I want to expand a bit.

You can imagine that a workshop using systems tools would have emergent properties that we would want to take into consideration as the process unfolded. As a result, we took our very detailed agenda, and put Day 1 into the format of a Facilitators Guide, for discussion on our pre-workshop briefing day with the Facilitation Team and organizers. This Guide had the following components:

  • The overview agenda (to see the flow and build of the workshop)
  • The detailed day-to-day agenda
  • Session-by-session descriptions

Each session was described for the Facilitation team and included the following information:

  • Time schedule: Where it fits in the overall workshop schedule and what comes next
  • Goals for the session: What’s the overall objective of this session
  • Materials required: Any equipment or materials needs (aggregated later into a master materials list)
  • Preparation: What speaker briefings, flipcharts prepared (including an image of these for copying), room set up, worksheets or templates to have on hand
  • Process: Script for facilitator and process flow (timed out within the session), images of the PowerPoint slides to use and how to brief them, activity sequence withn session.
  • Facilitator Notes: Tips, and what to watch out for, and things that might happen and what to do about that (Plan B ideas).

This level of detail helped us to discuss the overall goals, flow, and individual roles of each of the Facilitators for the whole first day. It helped make everything completely explicit so that we could explore and potentially change it, which we did in our briefing, we tightened the questions, shifted things around a bit so that they made sense to everyone and then attributed the sessions to each of the Facilitators so that their preparation that night could be focused.

During Day 1, our role was to check the Facilitators Guide against what actually happened. Checking that our time allocations were close to reality, that our instructions were clear (or if not, what needed to be said in the end to make them clearer), and noted the questions that participants asked. From the day and our end-of-day debriefing with the team, we added a section to the Facilitators Guide for each session called:

  • Notes from the Meso-America workshop: Ideas and items added, and learning captured from this pilot

Also during Day 1, I wrote the Facilitators Guide for Day 2, tweaking it where possible to match the language and any learning from Day 1. We used this to allocate roles and prepare that night for Day 2. We followed the same system for the next 2 days, using the Guide for briefing, and capturing learning in our debriefing. At the end of the workshop, we had a nearly completed Facilitators Guide. The day after our workshop we had a Reflection Meeting amongst the full team of partners and facilitators. Our discussion around learning about the preparation and coordination of the meeting added the following sections before (Pre-session Preparation)and after (Annexes) the session detail:

Pre-session Preparation:

  • Selecting a workshop venue: Space needs, light needs, wall space, breaks and meals
  • Invitations: What people need to know to attend
  • Choosing 2 Facilitators: Background and roles
  • Master materials/equipment list: Aggregated from session lists for sourcing
  • Rapporteuring and reporting: Getting people and set up for lots of information
  • Onsite briefing: How to structure this
  • First day prcess pre-opening: Engineering first impressions

Annexes:

  • Reporting framework: To use as a template (2 options)
  • Opening speech: This will probably be the similar each time
  • Feedback form (in session): The simple form to capture participant’s reflections
  • Postworkshop participants feedback: The form to send 1 month after to capture impacts
  • General comments on design: Larger ideas for evolution of the workshop
  • Participants comments: Some quotes from the feedback forms

So, we ended up with the whole workshop, literally, in a box! One of the plans for this workshop was that it would be repeated in three regions (it is a visioning and strategic planning workshop for a major global programme within our institution, that has regional implementation particularities). This “box” is a terrific learning tool – a useful Reusable Learning Object (RLO) – that can be sent ahead to the next partners (with the output report of the workshop) to prepare more effeciently the next iteration. It provides a place to capture learning from each subsequent workshop, so that at the end it serves as a collection of learning about this methodology, for further change. It also documents the process comprehensively enough that others who are interested in the methodology, but who did not participate, can potentially replicate all or part of the process.

All this was done just prior to and during the workshop and produced an unexpectedly useful process product that literally popped up alongside the final report.

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Leaking Left Brain Knowledge into Right Brain Action

I am at the annual Balaton Group meeting this week and we have been talking about, among other things, how to motivate people to change their behaviour – in this case, towards more sustainable actions.

One of our speakers on change agentry put up a slide titled, “Obstacles to change,” which included all kinds of reasons people give for not adopting more green behaviour (such as “my company needs to make a profit, my small contribution will not count for much, I can’t afford it”, etc.) Someone asked the quesion – are these obstacles to change, or rationalisations for not changing behaviour? Here was the argument:

People know what they want to do. When you encourage them to do something differently, they can easily come up with rationalisations of why they cannot possibly do it. Action emerges, it was suggested, in the right side of the brain. Action is vocalised, in the left side of the brain. Models, data, causal loop diagrams, and so on appeal to the left side of the brain. They can help people logically see what they should do and say so. In the right brain however, where the stories, emotions, images lie, is where the motivation to do something is initiated. The left side of the brain picks the song, but the right side of the brain dances to it.

If we want people to dance, to change their behaviour (for example after our systems visioning workshops), we need to do something that leaks over into the right side of their brain. We can’t just give them rationale, data, causal loop diagrams to get them to do things differently. That will help them find their direction. It will be the games, the images and maps, great questions and the heated discussions, that will get them to do something differently after our workshop. Let’s dance!

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Email During Workshops: Bad Manners or Proof of a New Paradigm in Learning

In the old days at workshops, there was a person up front speaking and everyone listened attentively. If they were not listening they were thinking about something else (a.k.a. daydreaming).

Today at workshops, there is a person up front speaking and everyone not listening is typing madly on their computer doing email.

Should we care?

Some people do care – they think that it is completely unacceptable that people are not paying attention and doing something else (a.k.a. multi-tasking). Perhaps I used to be one of those people – but not any more.

Now I think this is fine for a number of reasons, mostly because I see it as a sign that the paradigm of learning – as centred on the choice of the individual learner – has really shifted. Imagine that I am in a workshop which has speakers who are imparting information to me. If I am interested (and if they are interesting), and if I can use this information, (and they help me understand that I can use this information), then I will tune in long enough to see if I can learn something. If I decide to tune out, I may dip back in to check up to see if my original decision (to do email) was correct or not, or if I should start listening again. Overall, I am in charge of my learning and I can choose what information is useful to me right now. Of course, I need to keep an open mind, and I will always START by listening, and then reassess at some point. This is opposed to a centrally taught system whereby everyone needs to listen (or appear to be listening) to everything.

Now of course, for an organizer and a speaker, it is preferable if everyone listens to everything, and finds everything useful. This is, afterall, why you organized this workshop – YOU think that everything is valuable. What can you do to make sure that the audience agrees?

The number of people typing emails is an interesting indicator of how well the speaker is doing, and how useful the focus of their intervention is. It is also an indicator of interactivity. You cannot type and speak, play a game, answer questions, or have a powerful, thought-provoking question capture your attention. How refreshing would this be: The Facilitator says to the participants, “You are welcome to tune in and out of any of these presentations as you find useful. We ask that you please give each presentation a chance first. If you do decide to tune out, please notice the time elapsed (was it after 2 minutes, 5, 10 minutes) and please give us the feedback. It will be useful for future programming.” Viola, permission to choose your learning yourself.

That way people would still be in control of their learning, and speakers and organizers would get more data on what people want to learn and the best way of reaching them. It would also be a powerful motivation for speakers to make their presentations meaningful.

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Learning About Your Organization Where You Least Expect It

I have been working in my organization for almost five years. How much do I know about the work of my + 1’000 colleagues in different technical programmes and offices around the world? I would say more than most (thanks to the designing diverse workshops with a variety of teams) and still much less than I might like.

I just watched a couple of great episodes of Nature Inc. For some time I’ve been hoping to view these (having missed many when aired on TV; luckily now they are downloadable by episode as MP4s. I digress.) Anyway sat at my office desk, watching these in search of inspiration about the important links between business and biodiversity, I learned much. And, to my delight, much of what I learned was about what my own organization is doing in different parts of the world! I will be following up with my colleagues and seeing what lessons we can learn from creative and compelling communication channels like Nature Inc in helping us spread the word, outside and in! What others stones should I unturn. Where did you last learn something about your organization when you least expected it?

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Facilitator for Today: Thought Leader for Tomorrow?

In our organizations, who are the people igniting the passions of those around them? Who mobilizes the talents of the people they work with and builds collective as well as individual strength of others? Who are the ‘Thought Leaders’? And how are they leading thought? (See Robin Ryde’s short video which inspired this post.)

In the Learning and Leadership unit, we have been embracing invitations to design and facilitate workshops to help ‘lead’ thinking (as described in our earlier blog post: “Building Capacity in Systems Thinking: Want More Amplification? Don’t Call it Training”, August 14). We engineer experiences aiming to facilitate people thinking and conversing effectively and efficiently, purposefully mobilizing talents and building strengths. As today’s facilitators, are we the ‘Thought Leaders’ for tomorrow? And if we are, will this loaded label bring us greater success?

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Activity Makeover Using Appreciative Inquiry: From STUPID to SMART

In the last few years I have become a devotee of Appreciative Inquiry, I think it is a useful, energizing frame for learning. However, in some cases, you need to redesign activities, their briefing and debriefing so it is consistent with this approach. It feels a bit like taking a very fattening recipe and making it into a Weight Watchers one – trying to change some of the ingredients so that you still get your delicious chocolate cake, but it is much better for you.

In our workshop this week we played a game called “Thumbwrestling”, which is an excellent game that demonstrates collaboration versus competition. In the end, most people fail, and the debriefing talks about how people aren’t stupid, but the system in which they are operating actually promotes stupid behaviour. In the game, people are given a very short amount of time to get as many points as they can from their “opponent”. They are instructed not to hurt anyone, and given a demonstration that looks like hand-to-hand conflict. The result is that they do the same and they get about 2 points, rather than the 30-40 points they can get when they collaborate. The debriefing question is:

What went wrong?

The answer you get from participants is a useful collection of things to watch out for in the system around you when you are trying to improve your interaction with colleagues. The answers that the participants give as they observe their behaviour in the activity can cleverly be written like this:

Small Goals
Time pressure
Untrusting Partners
Poor Example
Insufficient Vocabulary
Dysfunctional Norms

Now, if you wanted to convert this activity, make your low calorie cake, with an appreciative frame here is a potentially better question, and a way to organize participants’ answers that might give the same insight but not make them feel as foolish:

What would give us a better behaviour?

Sufficient Vocabulary
Major Goals
Appropriate Timeframe
Right Examples
Trusting Partners

You can makeover any recipe and have your delicious learning cake and eat it too. (bit corny sorry!)

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Building Capacity in Systems Thinking: Want More Amplification? Don’t Call it Training

In our conservation organization we work in an environment which is opportunity rich and time poor. Therefore, one of our primary goals as the learning team is to help people to work and take decisions with powerful systems insights so that their interventions have the highest impact, and take the least amount of effort (including resources, time and money).

So among other things we do systems thinking training. A neat one- and two-day workshop that gives participants a chance to learn some specialised vocabulary, to practice a couple of useful systems diagramming tools, and to look for archetypes (repeating patterns). Our in-house training is popular with mostly young professionals who are interested to learn this approach and to use it in their work. With this kind of training we get people to adopt systems thinking one person at a time. In our younger colleagues, turnover is relatively high and yet we are happy to contribute to building overall capacity in our larger sustainability community.

Of course, this community is vast. Even our institution is enormous – both at Headquarters and in the field. With this approach it will take us years to get to everyone – IF we could even get everyone to attend. Higher level management staff do not sign up for this kind of training. Often they don’t feel they have time for professional development, and may not see from the description the direct applicability of this approach in their immediate work. However, if we could get these people involved, and when they incorporate this in their teams and programmes, the tools and thinking goes much further.

So we decided to not focus our whole strategy for building capacity in systems thinking on training. We have begun instead to incorporate the use of systems thinking tools for discussion and analysis in strategic planning workshops, which is precisely where the high level people need to be. We get more and more invitations to help design and facilitate visioning or planning workshops, the perfect environments for the application of systems thinking tools. The side benefit is that the participant group is very different than that of a training course. In fact, when an invitation comes through to do planning, visioning, and recommendations for your own organization or a partner, everyone works to get the highest level people possible, who then, if they like the process and outputs, can take them further for you – with direct implications for their teams, organizations and projects.

We realised this most strongly today at the end of a visioning workshop that we have been conducting in our organization’s Meso-America region with a staff team and partners. We spent 2.5 days with a set of iterative exercises that aim to identify the goals of water maangement in the region, to look at some existing trends in the past and possible future trends, to understand the inter-relationships in the existing system, to identify intervention points that help them to reach their goals of radical change, and finally to make concrete recommendations for the water management community in general, and our organization in particular, for strategic future work. In order to do this, we were obliged to help people first to understand and use the tools (Goals creation, Behaviour Over Time Graphs, and Causal Loop Diagrams), to practice them, to physically experience them with some interactive systems games, and to then use them to do their work together.

At the end of our workshop today, numerous people – heads of projects and programmes – asked us for our slides, and more information on the methodology, which we will be delighted of course to provide. They wish to use it in their project teams, to use it to diagram their systems and for communication with partners on what they are doing. After this visioning workshop, these high level people take with them a set of systems tools that they used for real-life decision-making and as a result of their experience using them can see the utility and applicability for themselves (and not second hand from a junior staff member who brought them back from a training course – although they should!)

We will never stop training our young colleauges; that is the future and they are well on their way to becoming the leaders of tomorrow. In parallel, however, we will continue to quietly embed these tools, with a tiny invisible training component and real life applications, into these strategic visioning discussions with high level people. The systems message will go much further and deeper through these proponents; the tools will travel faster (exponentially) out of our hands and through those of the particulants as they simultaneously share their learning; and overall be less financially resource intensive for us because we don’t need to finance the transfer ourselves. In the end, people will know and use the tools, they will share their learning in their own languages and contexts, and no one will ever need to refer to it as training. That is my systems insight for today!

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No More Thinking Out of the Box: Games Can Get Your Further

I regularly read the Thiagi monthly Gameletter which promises “seriously fun activities for trainers, facilitators, performance consultants and managers”. (Lizzie and I went to one of Thiagi’s workshops in Switzerland last year and I am definitely a devotee of this unusual gamer and trainer.) This month’s gameletter focuses on debriefing games, jolts (blinding flashes of insight from intense experiences), and links to other players in this field.

One of these players is Brian Remer and his Firefly group. I have just enjoyed a 60 minute clickthrough journey into Brian’s world. His monthly newsletters, focused on performance improvements and games, are pared down sparks of inspiration (as he calls them). More than anything I notice that they aim to be immediately applicable, and short. This latter quality is critical in today’s megamarket of words and ideas, and something I am coming to value (and need to work on myself). Maximum idea in a small space. He has a series called Say it Quick which always only consists of 99 words, and he gives the ETR (estimated time to read) his newsletter as 5 minutes (although he gives the ETII – estimated time to implement ideas at 5 weeks – I guess this is how long it takes you to forget something completely if you don’t try it).

What sold me on this newsletter was the thoughtfulness of Brian’s gentle diatribe in the July Newsletter about why he would not go to a conference workshop called “Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box”. He worried about its novelty if it could not come up with a more inspiring analogy for breakthrough thinking. He added, “Besides, breaking out of a box is not very difficult. And when you’re free, you’re still in the same …room!”

Look into the gamers, they are not just doing icebreakers anymore. Great games can get you out of that box, and out of the room, and into a whole new world of learning.

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Say It With Flowers

There are many ways to say “No”, some are distinctly better than others. Yesterday a mini experiment in saying “No” happened in our office. I wrote an email query (not the first time) which included a budget request and sent it to two senior managers in the institution. It was something I had been banging on about for months and clearly was beginning to be an issue that needed resolution. A short meeting had been held the previous day on the topic, so I was eager for the answer. Within 30 minutes of my message, both managers wrote me back. Both effectively saying “No”, but what a difference in approach, delivery, and how it made me feel afterwards.

One manager wrote me a one liner asking if he could talk to me about this. Then within 30 min he was standing in my office. We sat down, chatted for a minute and then he brought up the issue. He listened to me first, then he told me about the process and rationale for the decision. He gave me an example of how another staff member in my similar situation had found a solution and was working it out. He appealed to my sense of fairness (as in this case the limited budget I had requested was going to those who had no other options for participation without this means). He smiled, he asked if I understood, and in the end I felt a bit guilty about my initial request, was willing to give it up. I thanked him for his time and thoughtful explanation; I practically thanked him for his “No”. At the end of our 7 minute conversation I was more knowledgable about the process, I understood his challenges in decision-making and his rationale.

The other “No” response could not have been more different. The second manager wrote me an email and pasted in the text from the minutes regarding the decision that was taken in the meeting. It also refered to a memo from last January (which has not been spoken of again until recently). It had no rationale, was unapologetic, and straightforward in saying “No”. It ended with saying, effectively, the rules say you will not do this. All this in 4 lines of an email. Wow, the feeling of this “No” response was dramatically different. I made me feel argumentative; I wanted to take the time to dig out that January memo, follow all the discussions and find evidence of miscommunication, etc. write back a retort, stir up a fuss, stand on principle, etc. etc. Effectively, waste a lot of time (mine and potentially this manager’s) contesting a decision that only moments before I was completely fine with.

The nice approach won out. I will drop this now, but it is an interesting lesson in how to artfully say “No”. And also about time -short term time investment for long term time savings (in systems akin to the “Worse Before Better” archetype). Both managers are incredibly busy. However, taking 10 minutes to come see me saved this first manager (and me) potentially much more effort dealing with my reaction to this decision over time, and potential spin off reactions from bad feelings. Ironically, this short exchange with the first manager to tell me “No” probably even improved our relationship. Imagine being able to use a bad news situation to make interactions better overall – artful people management. I am not sure this would be the case with the second approach.

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Behind Jargon: Watching Paradigms Shift

Like tectonic plates, our understanding of different concepts in our world of work slowly, collectively shifts. Like in the natural world, parts may move at different speeds, and change may be initially imperceptible from some perspectives, but things are moving nonetheless. Changes in terminology often accompany these shifts; yet may be offhandedly dismissed as jargon by those who have not been involved in, or perhaps agree with, the new shift in thinking.

Behind jargon however is something; some conceptual change, and it is interesting to sift out the nuance, past the new words, to see how the community is growing and deepening it collective understanding for better applications and actions.

One shift I have seen over the last decade, in the environment and development community at least, is the change from training to capacity building, through capacity development to learning. We have seen this evolve in papers, conferences, programmes, departments, and it has even manifested itself in people’s titles. Take mine for instance. In the last 15 years of work (3 different institutions), I have gone from the Director of Training, to Director Capacity Development, to the Head of Learning. And this has not just been in words on business cards only; the way I work and my orientation has fundamentally if gradually changed.

15 years ago, capacity building was mostly about training, it was an extension of the academic environment and the realm of experts imparting useful information on participants and students, whether in a headquarters meeting room, or an extension office. It was for the most part workshop or event-based, intensive, and had lots of reading materials. When it existed, curriculum development was based on university outlines, reading lists and lecture notes, with discussion questions. Models like Train X were used to develop lesson plans for training (now I cannot find any mention of this methodology on the web, interesting). What participants got out of it was ascertained in exit questionnaires, much of it however was not repeated very often. It was focused on what people had to know to do something, starting from the ground up.

Capacity building took over from training, with more of a focus on application and a fuller understanding of the professional in his/her environment. Somehow capacity building was a broader, more integrated concept. Capacity development became the vernacular after about 10 years of building capacity, and with the increasing acknowledgement that professionals brought with them their own capacity, and often LOTS of it. So no longer were we building it (e.g. from scratch – with empty vessel-like connotations) but that we could strengthen and further develop into areas of excellence within people. Capacity development also came out of the classroom to many different in-situ environments – complete with more individualised applications and practice.

This subtle shift began to focus the process on the individual. More needs assessments, better understanding of what the people needed to DO with the information, helped to tailor and refine the input, which was now not only an event, but adopted a longer term approach – and more intervention opportunities – shadowing, mentoring, peer-learning, networking, work-place learning, preparatory e-conferences, post-activity advisory services, etc. And the whole process can be fun.

The newest shift to learning is an interesting one. Now it is all about me (well, not me personally, but all of us). No longer do I necessarily need my own learning and development to be moderated by some outside person or group, or include too much formal instruction, training or otherwise. I may want that for something specific, but I can develop my own pathway for improvement and updating to match what I want and need. Learning can happen anywhere and at any time. As we have read in Jay Cross’ book Informal Learning, 80% of workplace learning happens almost without our awareness – at a Sponsored coffee morning, in meeting discussions, in reading notices posted in the staff toilets, in our web searches, in our evening experiments with Second Life. Now a Learning Director has every spot in and outside the workplace to play with, and practically every hour of the day.

The end result is the most important and it is mostly determined by you, the learner. What do you need to do a great job? What do you need to learn, and what medium (or better, media) works best for you – and how many different, interesting, energizing ways can we help you to gather or create your knowledge, analyse it, test it, apply it, learn from it, and then keep at it. Now its lifelong learning, slowly moving, shifting and changing, just like those tectonic plates.

(Note: This post was inspired by my current reading of colleague Nicole’s “Opportunity Plan” for a leadership programme of ours. Apparently Business Plans are out, now they are called Opportunity Plans – I’m curious about the conceptual shift in thinking that’s behind this change.)

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Evaluation for What?

I have mentioned in previous posts the 12 month assessment and learning process we are undertaking for our upcoming World Conservation Congress (October 2008). An internal evaluation team is asking a question each month or so to a sample of staff working across functions in preparation (and delivery) of this major quadrennial event. Their aim is to capture more iterative and detailed reflection on learning over time, rather than doing a huge debriefing the day or week AFTER the event. The result should be information that we can strategically use, rather than the more generic (self-) congratulatory “smile sheet” responses that both participants and conference workers alike generate in the glow and relief of the end of such a huge event.

The question this month asks us to describe what we have learned since our last World Conservation Congress (Bangkok 2003), and what we are doing differently as a result.

I really like this question for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is an intervention in itself. Just the act of asking this question gets people to reflect on the past process and identify their learning, and think about how they are applying it now – effectively helping us to complete our learning cycles through application. If we have not already done so (connect our efforts last time with this new event), this question will get us to start, and potentially open up a whole box of useful know-how that has been parked in the dusty corridor of our brains. Secondly, the question is appreciative, in that is assumes that people have learned something from their past experience, and they just need to write it down to share with other people. Thirdly, I remember reading recently that people remember not so much what happened but what they TOLD people happened at an event. So by getting people to document their learning (even if it is 3 years later), the chances are greater that they will remember it longer (thus have the knowledge available to pull into service) by having had to analyse, process, and then craft a “story” for sharing.

I would say that one of the first things that we learned from our last World Conservation Congress is how to run an assessment of the event that is focused on learning, rather than on writing an evaluation report for funders. Now that will help make our next event even better.

Of course, 3 years later, people might not remember the detail strongly, but have feelings or impressions. Another good thing about this learning assessment is that you can share in what ever format you like. My impressions from the last Congress were strong, perhaps I will choose expressionistic painting or interpretative dance – how would the evaluation team work with that?

Did I answer the question?

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Horse, Rope, Hat, Ready to Go

We have just driven out of Yellowstone National Park, past herds of bison and grazing elk, through Shoshone National Forest along the Buffalo Bill Highway into Cody, Wyoming. My husband remarked that this had been the longest time he had been away from an internet or telephone connection in his professional life (he is a software engineer with a PDA). And I too cannot remember the last time I had five days with absolutely no way of reading my email or checking into the office.

Let me tell you, it is easier than you think. Day 1 is full of anxiety and intruding thoughts about what you left to do while on holiday (when you thought you could check in from time to time). On Day 2 those thoughts are fleeting and gradually give way to resignation about no possible signal (after walking around the campground to see if there is anything secretly emitting a signal that you can jump onto). Then by Day 3, it is the blissful, restful return to the pre-1989 (even 1889) state of NO EMAIL CONTACT. Then you just are where you are, with those you are with, and doing what you are doing at the moment. Fishing for cutthroat trout on a boat in Yellowstone lake. Watching a grizzly bear amble down the roadside. Counting how many colours of wildflowers there are along the trail. Trying to identify all the types of animal skat. Getting ready to go to the rodeo.

There’s a whole other world out there that has nothing to do with technology. It’s amazing how quickly you can go back…

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Like a Surgeon

This week’s conference extravaganza has been an eye opener (11 workshops and breakout sessions for a 500+ person conference, with effectively 2 Facilitators). Trying to process, reflect and be appreciative about what has transpired (and blogging about it each night ) has been incredibly useful to capture learning. We came here to help create the subtle environment for generative dialogue. Instead we were working very low on Maslow’s hierarcy of needs. That’s ok, it was what was needed. Tonight I’m going to use an analogy to try to crystalise what it has felt like to be here trying to focus on process facilitation.

This week we are like surgeons to whom the patient has come a little too late.

You work very hard to diagnose the problem, try different experimental interventions; but it is late in the game and you don’t see a significant change. When you finally have all the information, you can see clearly that many months ago, this condition would have been easily treated, but now the condition is too advanced to treat. However, you are compassionate and committed to remaining a caregiver. And you spend your time now focusing on making the patient comfortable, fluffing the pillow, administering local pain relievers, helping the patient maintain dignity – generally creating a nice environment for the final days – and making sure the strongest memories that visitors and loved ones have of your patient are good ones. No level of intervention at this point, no matter how invasive, will change the patient’s outcome; so you put your energies into administering care and support, and do it in the nicest possible way. (e.g. My most significant contribution today was buying a bottle of rum for the drafting team.)

There is a real role here for preventive medicine. We need to get to the patients much earlier. We need to help establish good habits, good reflexes, good decision making, good planning, and thus good healthy, interactive workshops and peer learning sessions, and happy participants. Surgeons are trained to do amazing things, if its not too late.

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What Was That

I took an art class in college where we got to programme 1 minute of our classmates’ lives. I don’t remember now what the project was, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do at the time. I worked with another student and we decided to try to fill that 60 seconds with as much stuff as possible – sounds, visuals, odors, movement. We put together everything we could find. We showed overlapping videos, projected enormous slides, put up a wall of writing on an OHP; we played radio music, blasted a CD compilation, tuned an electric guitar, set off a line of alarm clocks. We splash painted the wall with fluorescents as a backdrop, sprayed strong cleaning aerosols, flashed coloured strobes, and got people to take in the whole thing standing and moving around.

We did this for 60 seconds, which might sound short, but in this case felt like a lifetime. With full sensory overload, at the end of it, we were all freaked out and utterly exhausted. People looked at us at the end of this long minute and said, “What was that”.

Today, we held our first set of 11 workshops and breakouts for this 500+ person conference. The workshops started 1 and a half hours late and were all over town, some accessed by buses some by foot, breakout groups were in different buildings – the Mayor’s office, the cultural centre, an expo space, a parish meeting room. We were two facilitators…

We left this morning at 7am. It is 6pm at the time of writing. Alarms, stand-by helicopters and EMTs, town bells, accordians, police dogs, hundreds of PPT slides, VIPs, walkie talkies, invasive species, flashing cameras, 9 buffet tables, French, TV interviews, English, key note speeches, (the strong smell of) freshly painted everything, Spanish, laptops clattering, walking on the stage with the message, Portuguese, ten buses, walking off the stage with a message, traffic marshals, wifi, climate content, images of sinking islands, rapporteurs, roving mikes. I’m sitting in this auditorium at the end of the day thinking, “What was that?”

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Adventures in Facilitation

Over 9 hours today, Aisha (co-facilitator for this big conference in La Reunion) and I drove one and a half hours into the mountains to heroically visit our workshops’ venues for tomorrow, and then another hour to the Thursday venues, where we:

* Visited and counted over 1700 chairs in 37 workshop rooms;
* Tested coffee makers for noise and ease of use (I will not sleep for 2 days);
* Checked at least six set of toilet stalls for paper and soap (interestingly found in most cases only in the men’s toilets, we did find soap then…);
* Shook hands with the proud Mayor of a small town;
* Remembered that, when you give 500 people the same backpack (gift for site visit), they cannot imagineably find their own again when they put them down, without a label (not a popular recollection with the person who had to go out and find 500 luggage tags);
* Noticed that there are no waste baskets in La Reunion, thus see a huge market opportunity for portable, pop up waste baskets;
* Strategized bus turnaround opportunities on one lane roads with no shoulders;
* Bought 25 magic markers, 100 squares of sticky stuff; and at least 600 boiled sweets;
* Told the person who had given logistics announcements that he had erroneously announced a bus meeting time that was 30 minutes too early (06:30 instead of 07:00) and recommended that he correct that announcement or risk getting lynched by hundreds of non-morning people at breakfast;

I could go on, but the organizing team has just walked in the door, and I need to get back into my mild-mannered facilitator clothes and work with them on the best learning designs for their large-scale workshops, and, of course, brief them to take their own TP tomorrow…

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Welcome to La Reunion

It strikes me as particularly fitting that the organizers chose Ile La Reunion (reunion is actually “meeting” in French) for a big conference that is being held this week on the topic of the European Overseas Territory islands and climate change adaptation. This beautiful volcanic island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is as far away from Brussels as you can get (at least contextually if not geographically-it is delightful to see the Brussels-based diplomatic crew in flipflops).

With 586 people descending on the island from all parts of the world, this is turning into a very large gathering of incredibly passionate opionions and a diversity of perspectives. As a result, this week might serve as a not-so-dry run for our upcoming Congress in October and produce some good learning for the most process aware. This could however be a luxury that only I will have, as this meeting has many of the same hallmarks as our Congress – most notably a small organising team made of primarily of content experts who have also been given the task to make it happen (from stuffing the conference bags to delivering one of the keynote speeches). It can be an incredible team building exercise which lets people step out of daily roles and showcase their abilities to stretch into new situations; it can also create situations where the transferability of competencies to different and completely new tasks is not so easy or obvious. The reactions will be very individual and can provide an amazing laboratory for the conscient manager.

Ostensibly I am here in La Reunion to work with the coordinators of a set of 11 workshops on the results-orientation of their workshop designs, and to help deliver a few of these with a second, Mauritian, facilitator. And I am not sure I can resist shining the spotlight from time to time on our overall process here, and what the delivery team is learning. We will see what the appetite is for this simultaneous task and team maintenance conversation. It may also help identify some strategic interventions for more individual and institutional capacity building around these critical convening skills and collaborative processes.

With hundreds of people coming from all parts of the world, from the largest European bureaucracies, and the smallest island administrations, from local civil society to official representatives of the United Nations, La Reunion will no doubt be a creative collision space, both for the participants, and for us.

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Reframing Our Big Dig

For the next 18 months, our organization has a Big Dig going on outside our office windows. This enormous excavation started last week with a ground breaking ceremony that launched our new building, one of the greenest in Europe. A hard hat zone, the roar of big machines, the sound of crunching as tons of cement blocks get pulverised into bite sized pieces for carrying away (and giving away), and an absolutely enormous hole. What will they find? Roman coins, medieval dumping grounds, dinosaur bones??? (We are after all located in the foothills of the Jura mountains, home of the original Jurassic Park!)

Of course the intense noise, clouds of dust, and soul shaking vibrations are different than we are used to in our work at headquarters, located in a quiet Swiss town on the banks of Lake Geneva, so this situation is ripe for reframing. If I think about some of the workplaces of our colleagues around the world – on storm-tossed boats in the ocean as they collect specimens in marine biosphere reserves, in deep field offices with dodgy water and intermittent electricity, in work sites near war areas and oil spills, and on and on; I guess this experience helps us imagine some of what our colleagues in the field and other parts of the world get to integrate as a part of their work for our organization. Flexibility, resilience, keeping our sense of humour? All useful workplace survival skills!

Of course, it’s easy for me to see things differently, I write this blog post from Australia where I am on a work trip, half way across the world from our Big Dig. And still on Monday, when I was last in the office, I got to feel the thrill what it might have been like to work beside a Tyrannosaurus Rex feeding ground!

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Training for the IronMan: A Conference Worker’s Guide

(NOTE: This post is dedicated to hundreds of my colleagues who will be literally running our upcoming quadrennial mega-event. You know who you are!)

I spent last week in Barcelona where my organization is going to hold its World Conservation Congress of 8,000 people, which we have been blogging about these past few months. During my trip to Barcelona, we visited the Congress centre and saw the various rooms and halls, and most importantly were given some very practical tips about the centre, where we would be spending around 10 days of our lives, day and night.

On my way home to Geneva from Barcelona, I read an article in the inflight magazine about two London office women who decided to do the Ironman triathalon. The story explained their learning and preparation for this grueling competition, which includes a marathon, 112 miles of biking, and 2.4 miles of swimming. You need to be competent at everything to finish – similar to our Congress. You might be a mild-mannered project manager for 355 days a year, but at Congress you can take on the role of media spokesperson, usher, VIP handler, translator, and high-level panelist in one day, with super quick changeovers between each.

And like the Ironman you need to prepare yourself if you want to finish in one piece. No showing up the day of the race and lining up at the start (or the registration table). For our Congress, preparation means practice of these new roles (I took my media training course today), getting rid of your sleep deficit, and taking care of that low grade cold you have been nuturing for months. Hard work and many nights of minimal sleep will find your immune system a real pushover – probably on day 2 of the Congress.

Another thing the Ironwomen learned in their preparation for the event was that you need to learn things you never imagined you needed to know. Like how to fix your own bicycle – during the race, no one is going to stop and help you fix a blown tire. They are too focused on their own race to even notice, or be able to stop and help. Our Congress may be the same, with everyone flying in every direction preparing for any of the 40 simultaneous events at any given time. When your caffeine withdrawal is giving you a whopping headache, and there are 300 people waiting at the coffee bar, you need to be able to produce your own solution. What about a thermos of coffee that you made that morning in your hotel room? (bring your travel kettle, instant coffee and thermos – sorted). When you just need a glass of wine at the end of the day – know where the nearest supermarket is, and pack your corkscrew. Lay in some nutritional snacks, proper meals will be few and far between – think of those Ironwomen and their protein bars, water bottles, energy drinks.

And don’t forget the proper kit and gear. You might not need the wetsuit and onesie, but something that will work for day and the evening reception (that you will never have time to change for), a fanny bag that you can wear even if you are on the podium – so you don’t have to retrace your steps over the last few hours to look for the bag you left under a table somewhere. And the essential thick soled shoes (think miles of granite floors, with not a centimeter of carpet in sight.)

And at the end of your test of extreme endurance, you will have the great satisfaction of knowing that you could do it, you finished it, you learned some new things about yourself and your co-racers, and perhaps can help advise the next group of Ironmen and women, or Conference workers, on how to prepare, and hopefully enjoy, this once in a lifetime experience.

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Taking Your Work Outdoors

You don’t need to be a farmer or a tree surgeon to work outdoors. Even office workers benefit from a bit of fresh air and fresh perspective sometimes.

Today we did our team’s mid-year performance assessment, and because it was hot, and there is construction right outside our office window, we decided to have our 2 hour meeting out back of the building in our break area under the trees. It was cool and fresh, and the context was so different that I cannot help to think that the unusual setting encouraged us to have a different conversation than the one we might have had in our more institutional office space.

As a bonus, we also got a new perspective on what work means for some of our colleagues. First we saw a co-worker walk by in a pair of chest waders and a long stick. Following that was another colleague in a long T-shirt and barefeet (and noticeably missing a pair of trousers). Before this blog post gets an X rating, I must say that (upon query) they were draining the bog in our natural garden (a beautiful wetland area with all native Swiss species). We enviously watched another work style in our office, one that happens outside more often than not – and what’s stopping all of us from taking our work outdoors more often? Have a meeting? Need to have a different conversation? Take a walk!

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“Thanks for the reminder – much appreciated!”


31 out of 40 workshop organizers prefer quick reminders two days before a deadline – or so my learning from last week tells me.

In preparation for a week of ‘Learning Opportunities’ during the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, October 2008, I am in regular contact with 40+ organizers of workshops. All are busy people in jobs spread worlwide, offering to share their skills and build the capacities of others to use them.

Over the course of the remaining 4 months – as we put together an online application system for participants, prepare the official Congress programme, develop detailed agendas, collect biographers and supporting materials and make these available on the web – there will be a lot of communication between us. I need to make sure that they continue to cooperate and make my life easy. And I need to help them to help me.

Last Friday was our second deadline (revised titles and session descriptions please). I sent out the request and some guidance two weeks ago. Little back by Wednesday, so I had a decision to make. Sit tight, wait and – come Friday evening – send emails chasing all those who had failed to reply with an impassioned plea and the threat of exclusion from the applicants system? OR a polite, ‘quick reminder’ that afternoon to those i’d not yet heard from. Needless to say, I chose the latter and happily, moments later, in came responses: “Thanks for the reminder – much appreciated!” By Friday evening all had come flooding in. The lesson: help people keep to agreements – it feels good all round.

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Games for 1000? Interactivity and Large Groups


Who created the “Wave”? Tens of thousands of fans working together to send a message to their team, standing up, joining the action, adding their voice? If a seated stadium of 50,000 people can be interactive, then a Congress of 8,000 can be too!

Well, we might not be able to do the Wave at our Congress, but there are plenty of other interesting ways to involve those thousands of people in what is happening on stage, in the many smaller meeting rooms, and in the hallways.

Our expert facilitation team has been coaching session organizers in the last 6 weeks to help them define, design, and refine their 90 minute workshops for the upcoming World Conservation Congress. Let’s see what kind of interactivity they are coming up with…

Facilitators, can you let us know, what kind of things are the teams creating that is different (from the standard panel session)? What are some of your ideas for creating interactivity in large groups? Write us a few lines in the comments section below – thank you in advance!

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Creating the Climate for Change: Raising Your Response Rates

We learned something rather counterintuitive this year about response rates when communicating with a virtual network. Our unit coordinates an expert network of communicators and educators with over 600 people particpating around the world. This network from time to time is asked to contribute their thoughts in planning and decision-making, so their response is important. You would think that interacting with a network of communicators would be a breeze. As it turns out, it is, if you ask the right questions in the right way – therein lies the learning.

Every four years this network gets a new Strategic Plan, a process lead by a Steering Committee of 15 people and validated by the network. Our first message to the group in this process seemed simple enough – the Steering Commitee had identified 3 options for a tag line for the Commission – pick your favorite one. That message went out to 600 people and one week later we had, wait for it, 8 replies. That is a response rate of 1.3% – not statistically relevant. So we did not have our tag line.

Our next challenge was to get inputs to the Strategic Plan itself – a 25-page text document. How could we possibly get a better response rate on a dense document, when only 8 people answered a one-liner? Well, what we decided to do was to NOT send the whole document as an attachment to the group of 600 asking “Dear Commission Members, please find attached a 25-page document for your comments”. If you really did not want comments, that would be a strategic way to do it.

Instead, we wrote a short email that informed people about the draft document and asked for volunteers to read it and give comments. Now this was a very different question, and demanded a different response. People needed to write us back first explicitly that they wanted to read the document, and would send comments. This extra step, effectively a commitment statement, proved to be important in terms of getting people’s involvement. What they got back then was a personalised email from me with the document, instructions, and a sincere thank you in advance. This time our initial response rate was over 100 people (asking to read the document) and of those over 80 sent in their comments, which were extensive, thoughtful, and significantly strengthened that important document. The final response rate was 13% – it might sound low, but when it’s you that’s incorporating 2000 pages of detailed comments to a document, it is quite sufficient.

What’s more – on page 13 of the document, in the middle of the page, we listed the three tag lines and noted that the Steering Committee requested Commission members to vote for A, B, or C. This time amazingly everyone wrote their vote into the document, and we have our tag line (and most importantly some new learning about) – Creating the Climate for Change.

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Insights in Design: Team Retreats

Earlier this week we ran a two day team retreat for one of our largest distributed teams. Attending the retreat was both the technical and admin staff, as well as HQ and outposted staff. That was objective 1 – giving people a sense of interconnectedness in a non-intact team, and at the same time explore the team’s diversity.

The retreat also needed to bring up and sensitively deal with issues of growth and managing a larger team. In the last few years, due to their successes, the size of the group has more than doubled, with little turnover. As a result, some of the team practices (communication, decisionmaking, trust building, everyone doing everything him/herself) that worked before with a small, tightly knit team, are no longer as effective with a larger, more functionally diversified group. That was objective 2 – air some growth and management challenges in a way that everyone can feel heard and then make some decisions about how to change them.

Finally, the group needed to think together about what’s next. So they needed to tap back into their goals, and also explore together what they needed to add or significantly strengthen in their current practice. This was more programmatic, however, they needed to bring the admin side of the team along so that any decisions made were completely operational. That was objective 3 – consider how to add some functionality to the group, but do so in a way that was realistic and feasible, and fit within the operational system they had and were building (or change it to fit).

With a mandate like that, and two days to work with, we had our work cut out for us. However, we did it, and the team was very happy with the results. Here are a few things we learned that worked:

  • We used systems thinking tools to help to guide and structure the discussions. People were delighted to use these new tools, which when applied to the operational aspects of the team’s work, were able to integrate and value the inputs of everyone there, from both the technical and administrative parts of the team.
  • The systems tools created a safe space. The diagrams helped to externalise the conversations, so that people were able to focus on an object, diagram, that depersonalised issues. People discussed trends and cause and effect: pointing their finger at the flipchart diagram and not each other.
  • The tools are iterative, so they break down what seems like a process about everything into a set of logical steps and bitesize pieces. Also because of this structure, there was no anxiety from what might otherwise be a messy process. The tools gave clear boundaries to the discussion.
  • Finally, the format of working in parallel on a number of different operational issues allowed people to focus on the ones for which they had the most passion, yet still contribute through the summaries and sharing to the work of other groups.

The report that resulted from the event included the diagrams and captured the creativity of the process for next steps. It was actually a good read, a quality that all workshop reports should have. And it has spawned a number of processes around the outcomes that is making this team one of the leaders of change in our institution.

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Learning Lessons from Systems Thinking

I see this pattern over and over and over again. What can one do about it? One potential intervention point is to set a standard/policy on the “attention per project” so that when there is not enough time to do it properly, you do not accept it, thus maintaining quality work and therefore reputation (so in theory the project pipeline never dries up). GTD gives us more time to squeeze more in. Zero-in box helps us comfortably manage our email blizzard. Systems helps us identify problematic patterns and potential leverage points for change. Where can one go to learn “How to Say NO” ?
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Appreciating Heroism For the Future


“The new Al Gore presentation on climate change at Ted’s talk is an inspirational, bright and optimistic approach worth a look at” wrote Nicole Thonnard Voillat – and so I did online at World Changing.

I really appreciated his comments on optismism being not about belief but behaviour which goes beyond our choice of lightbulbs to active citizenship in our demoncracy, mobilizing political will and resources. Stimulating a hero generation with a sense of generational mission is an exciting challenge that I would like to hear more from him on – in terms of what he thinks it will take to do this. Reframing the ‘terrible burden’ on our generation as a fabulous opportunity which we should respond to with profound joy and gratitude is an interesting start…

I wonder how we might use appreciative inquiry to explore examples of past hero generations and learn about how best to leverage another for the future? Thought provoking. What do you think?

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Can a Leopard Change Its Spots?

My hopeful answer to this is “well, maybe.” I get my evidence from a recent experiment that I conducted quite by accident.

Two month ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test and felt the results were accurate (self-validated). The instrument I thought had captured fairly my preferences on the four dichotomies. One of my preferences at that time was “P” – Perceiving rather than Judging. Perceivers are spontaneous, go with the flow, they make lists and lose them, they complete tasks at the last minute or late rather than well in advance.

Well, in today’s world with no speed limits on the information highway, this particular species is likely to get run over. So I have been working on this. One month ago we invited David Allen to come and address our staff on Getting Things Done, an approach which (check previous GTD tags) provides a system to help you keep alive in the organizational jungle. Many of us after his seminar have adoped this appoach and it appears to be working.

Now back to my experiment, yesterday I went to an MBTI training course and for that I had to take the instrument again, just a few months after my first test. I was amazed at the change. Everything was the same, except that my preference on the “outerworld orientation” dichotomy moved from Perceiving to Judging – with unfamiliar words like planned, structured, decisive, scheduled, makes lists and uses them, as descriptors.

I can only imagine that this difference in such a short period of time could be influenced by the GTD experience, which is still very fresh. Hopefully this change will last. I wouldn’t want to lose any of my spontaneity, and at the same time a little more structured follow-up and information management would not go amiss. Maybe just half of the spots could change? Would I then become a GMO? (GTD-Modified Organism?)

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(Preparing) The Greatest Show on Earth

What do you see when you go to the circus? You see the amazing daredevil acrobatic teams, the perilously high tight rope walkers, the perfectly synchronized performing ducks… What you don’t necessarily see is the lifetime of concentrated training the acrobats have undergone, the many hours a day the jugglers practice, and the fact that the lion tamer is actually missing a thumb.

The incredible amount of preparation that it takes to pull off a thrilling, memorable and meaningful performance is what my organization is experiencing right now in the preparation of its quadrennial global Congress. Expectations of 8,000-10,000 attendees have raised the stakes for putting on a really exceptional event. What that means for us is not only getting the logistics right, but also engaging the audience – our colleagues, partners and visitors – in many different, exciting ways.

Some people might be born with the ability to juggle flaming torches while standing bareback on a cantering horse (in sequins no less.) For others, it takes some practice, preparation and a good deal of help. The same is true for our events. So, for the first time at a Congress, we have engaged an international team of professional facilitators as advisors, who will work with 54 of our colleagues leading on different Secretariat sessions. This facilitation team will help the leads to think through their events and make suggestions as to interactive tools and techniques that they might use to get their messages across and novel ways to engage the audience. Whether it is Open Space Technology, Conversation Cafes, or newly designed large group games, the goal is to see how we can break through the fourth wall between those on stage and those in the bleachers, to reach them, touch them, challenge them, learn from them, and engage them in our work.

Because this is rather experimental, we are going to capture our learning throughout the preparation as a part of the M&E process. So more will appear on this blog on the Congress Facilitation Advisory Team and its work to help us prepare our Greatest Show on Earth -suddenly I’m craving popcorn.

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The Peak of Productivity: GTD

When do you have a burning desire at 9pm on a Sunday to go into your office and sort through your mountan of paperwork for 3 hours? When you feel like you are, for the first time, actually Getting Thing Done.

After a visit and full day seminar from David Allen last week, creator of this popular approach to personal productivity, our office has been hit by the intense need to Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do. When I started my organizing streak last night, I didn’t have to create my own categories of lists, I simply copied my colleague’s, who had spent all day Thursday and Friday setting up her own system. We had 54 staff members attend the seminar – I heard that there was a run on folders, and that people were scouring the basement for old in-trays and bits of filing cabinets the rest of the week.

Now I have my own mind sweep nearly complete; that is, getting all of those undone things that David refers to as work on a set of next action lists, from performance assessments to paying my cafeteria tab. And when I can get over the intense sense of urgency of doing all of those things that I had actually forgotten, I hope that my weekly review will free up some physic ram so that I can get on with some of the creative things on my Someday/Maybe list.

Sound like a new language? It might be for some, but it’s not a foreign one and not hard to learn. It’s based on practices you do regularly, but puts them together in a more effecient, and systemic way. And it seems to really appeal to people. One of my colleagues said that in the first 30 minutes of his seminar she had decided to adopt the GTD approach, because it was simply better than the one she was currently using. Another colleague worried about the extra time investment asked David at the end of his seminar, “Doesn’t using GTD take a lot of discipline?” David responded with “Yes, absolutely, but anything takes discipline before it becomes a habit. Brushing your teeth and taking a shower regularly took enormous discipline (or disciplining) when you were a kid. Until it became a habit. Now it feels bad not doing it. You need to get to that stage with this practice as well. “

Feeling on top of things is the peak of work/life balance. I can just about see the top of my paper mountain. It’s bright and beautiful up there. When I get there I am going to shout from the top of it, “It works! Labelmaker anyone!?”

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Facilitator’s Notebook: Were You Listening?

The start of any workshop normally includes a tour-de-table where people introduce themselves and say a few words about their expectations and why they are there. If you are going around in a circle, you can figure out how long it will be until your turn. Then you calculate how many people you can actually listen to before you need to think about what you are going to say. At that point you tune out in order to come up with something that sounds interesting and intelligent, until after your turn. After your turn, you replay your intervention a few times in your head to convince yourself that it was a good contribution and made you look good. Then you tune in again. Out of the 20 or so participants, you ended up hearing about half or less.

As a facilitator what can you do to get people to register the interesting information about each other that will start to connect them at a personal level, allowing you to move the group towards more and more powerful, creative, potentially intense and exciting discussions? People need to feel comfortable with the other group members for that; it can be a bit risky in the group process sense. How can you catalyze that process?

There are of course many ways to do this. What we did last week, with a small group of people who will be working together for two years on a project at a distance, was to give them a team quiz.

No one said that you had to listen the first time, maybe some of them did not. However, the next morning after their introductions on Day 1, they received a pop quiz about the team to complete titled, “Were You Listening?” Match the person to their musical instrument (who played the bassoon, the piano, the guitar?) Who studied philosophy in university? Which two people do not speak Portuguese (because almost everyone else in this group does)? Who coined a well-known conservation term? Who started their career in the civil service? Ten multiple choice questions captured some of the interesting things about this new team, taken from the things that they had said about themselves in the previous day’s introductions.

If they did not pick it up the first time, then this was the second opportunity to absorb the information. And this time, going through the answers of the quiz and discussing them further, everyone was listening.

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