Where the real value of these events lies is the networking. Echoes of colleagues past and present “I’m just going there to talk with x, y and z and meet new people”… With networking, I’m not talking about the behaviour of some people that act like machines and qualify the success of their participation to an event by the amount of business cards swapped, as a juvenile Brit (more likely to happen) would qualify the success of his night out by how wasted s/he is. No, I’m talking about meaningful networking. Interweaving. Of the type that is born of genuine reciprocal interest and mutual engagement, that leads to learning.

“]

Weaving contextual webs - the ultimate event experience? [Credits: Scott Hibberson

So we might be well advised to not forget that the main value of the events we organise really comes from this type of interactions rather than the programme itself – all the more so if that programme has been designed by a selective little group rather than co-created along the way – in which case there are chances the contents of the event can also be very relevant and applicable. And we certainly should allocate ample time for people during breaks to weave their contextual webs.

Related blog posts:

• What to expect from a workshop – blinding, bridging and binding experiences?
• Stop taking hostages! The ills of poor event design and facilitation
• Rethinking facilitation and engagement
• Capacity for change

Yammer is the new rage – the corporate social network has been gaining a lot of recognition and users in 2011 and seems stronger than ever. In my new organisation – the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which is part of a broader network of research centres called the Collaborative Group on International Agricultural Centre (CGIAR), we are also using Yammer. Time to zoom in on the theory and practice behind Yammer.

Yammer: rad or fad?

At first sight, Yammer has the look and feel of Facebook (same blue and white scheme and definitely more feature options than on Twitter + the ubiquitous ‘Like’ option)  and some of the functioning logic of Twitter (a lot of micro-blogging, use of @ to link to a person and of # to relate to a topic). It is not yet very clear to me to what extent the CGIAR as a whole is pushing for Yammer as an enterprise-wide social network or whether Yammer has just evolved organically to the discretion of each CG centre. In any case on the CGIAR network (let alone related project networks) there are over 1300 members (out of an estimated 15.000?), over 80 groups and over 10.000 messages have been posted since the adoption of the social network some three years ago I believe. It is not insignificant. And it makes the practice all the more important.

What to make of the tool?
I never used Yammer before joining ILRI and frankly, being a Twitter and Facebook user, I found Yammer super easy to grow into – although I can totally imagine that this is not the case for everyone, particularly if they don’t work on knowledge management and social media ha ha. Then again every tool should be explored by every user to find out if it suits their style and practices. And there is nothing wrong with deciding – after careful exploration – that a tool doesn’t work for us.
From my experience, here are some useful and not so useful features of Yammer…

So where are we now? There is still a lot of potential for Yammer to grow within the CGIAR and that means a lot of awareness-raising, coaching, training to make sure people feel comfortable with the tool. It also means a lot of feedback (see this post on the power of feedback) to ensure good practices. And, sure, not everyone is on it, not everyone is a super active user but we hear that many silent users actually enjoy reading their newsfeed and digests. At any rate, Yammer at ILRI is way more effective for sharing information than any intranet I’ve been given to check or use in the past 10 years.

In addition, ILRI and the wider CG system have implemented a few useful practices to make the Yammer experience richer to all:

• Developing a tailored page on ‘Yammer essentials’ which helps any newcomer find some good practices and useful settings (e.g. turning off a lot of email notifications, updating profile, indicating what centre they are part of etc.);
• Offering ongoing training and coaching for individuals and teams, to avoid letting people in the dark and giving up early on;
• Making extensive use of @ to alert concerned people when they are mentioned in the network – to stimulate them to at least follow the buzz on the network, if not update regularly;
• Connecting Yammer to all the blogs and wikis and websites around our CG centres as and when relevant to make Yammer the ‘reflector/connector of choice’;
• And recently developing a bespoke application (it is possible when asking Yammer) to integrate blog feeds into the ILRInet group, without affecting design – this option was available before but messed up the layouts really badly and made the blog posts’ text practically unreadable. This has been fixed by my colleague Zerihun Sewunet and it looks wonderful.

We are still learning with the tool but there seems to be some momentum. That said, of course there is room for improvement and the buzz on the internet around Yammer indicates that there is a lot to learn about Yammer and about how people might want to use it or not…

What of the buzz around the tool?
There’s been quite a few articles about Yammer in the past couple of years – here is a selection to find out what you think and to find better ways to use Yammer. First, why Deloitte staff love Yammer:

• A more critical view about Yammer – why it’s doomed to fail: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yammer_and_other_virtual_workspaces_have_real_prob.php
• Lessons from Ian Thorpe (UNICEF ) about using Yammer: http://delicious.com/redirect?url=http%3A//kmonadollaraday.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/yammer-lessons-i-learned/ – is a useful testimony about how one power user has perceived relative benefits and challenges of using Yammer.
• Yammer vs. email and IM: http://www.scribd.com/doc/30252894/Yammer-vs-Email-and-IM
• 43 ways to use Yammer: https://www.facebook.com/YammerInc?sk=app_129982580378550 (requires prior ‘like it’ on Facebook) is a great resource of tips and tricks for beginners and advanced Yammer users;
• Using Yammer for crisis communication: http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2011/04/emergency-preparedness-with-yammer.html is an example of how Yammer can prove a very useful tool to communicate in delicate situations;

Related blog posts:

• Blogging for what? For reflecting, for sharing, for learning, for synthesising, for…
• Twitter survey results: who tweets most (about work)?

Related to the carnival, but taking place in December, the feast of fools is another fascinating popular event that marked Western Europe’s history from the sixth to the sixteenth century. The idea of the feast of fools was indeed to bestow “power, dignity and impunity [...] to those in a subordinate position.” A mini social revolution that perhaps helped keep the sanity of the society of the time by allowing an extraordinary amount of pressure to come off the system in a structured outburst of freedom.

The feast of fools (Bruegel) - why not use that powerful frustration outlet for our modern age?

I’ve always thought that – with careful design and due ‘facilitation’ – it might be a good idea to try such a feast of fools in an organisation. It may not have to follow the medieval model and be reserved exclusively to those who don’t have power, but it could just be organised as a day when everyone might feel free to give feedback to anyone else in any possible way. With or without a mask (as was the case in the middle age)…

Of course this might go terribly wrong. Medieval time celebrations and their Roman ancestor, Saturnalia, also went out of hand occasionally. This is where a sound dash of structure could come in handy; and there are plenty of options to ‘frame’ that feast of fools: a short presentation on how to give feedback? Having all staff wear a disguise, mimicking the age-old mask function? Feedback provided not verbally but in writing or post it notes mysteriously stuck on the walls? Theatrical enactment of the issues that deserve feedback? There are many options…

The idea has not been tried out to my very limited knowledge. And if it was put to test, perhaps even after a few try-outs in a more limited environment, it might prove a powerful cathartic learning exercise that would help a) feel better indeed about letting go of some deep thoughts, b) revealing unexplored, below-the-table issues that deserve improvement, c) reinforcing a culture of feedback and d) offer another opportunity for creative thinking…

As I’m starting this new year of blogging, perhaps it’s also your chance to test this idea in practice on this blog by freely providing any feedback, however critical, about this blog and what I do with it between now and this Friday?

Now, that was a shoot… hopefully not just a ‘shoot me’.

Related blog posts:

• A new year of fun, focus, feedback and some new ideas

In September 2011 I facilitated a workshop on the identity of Except and on various knowledge management initiatives that could support the development of this very modern, dynamic and slightly messy networked organisation (consciously or unconsciously following the complex approach of messy coherence).

Except integrated sustainability

The workshop consisted in a series of sessions aimed at collectively establishing the identity of Except and working on knowledge management: a speed dating exercise revealed some hidden talents of Except staff to one another; a Samoan Circle  session on the identity of Except; a mapping of Except’s clients, their impressions and their expectations vis-à-vis the organisation; crafting key messages for those clients, using the message box methodology from Spitfire’s Smart Chart tool; group work on four related activities to improve customer service; a short presentation on KM and working in groups on three tiers of KM activities:

1. How to ensure a good induction and personal development of (new) staff
2. How to update and sustainably manage the Except information database and
3. How to hold quality conversations, online and offline.

So what happened, three months later?

A series of changes have tilted the organisation towards liberating knowledge flows and embracing (slightly) structured social learning:

• Except is now a lot more aware of its need to communicate, internally – to identify and bridge the gaps of day-to-day work – as well as externally to articulate its identity and set of services in a more outspoken way. Among others, they have developed more strategic documents to explain what they are working on, for the Board of directors and strategic clients;
• Staff members have also realised the importance of feedback – both to one another but also to and from customers. Gathering client feedback about the services rendered is now part and parcel of any new account;
• There are regular after action reviews to assess how any account management process went and improve over time;
• The management has set up an enterprise wiki to document many significant work processes. Although it initially took a while for people to embrace it, after some awareness-raising and training, most members are now using the wiki and saving a lot of time using project page templates, finding information about the questions they have etc.
• Most staff members seem to work in much more transparent ways in sharing information and in documenting / recording their work. Except has also developed a file naming convention which helps find files much more easily;
• Generally, staff members seem to be better able to find and apply the protocols that exist for a number of processes in house. Eva seemed to suggest that they are more conscious about their learning needs and activities.

All in all, the seeds of change are blatant and very rich. Not least, the organisation has unlocked conversations – people are talking to one another more and seem happy to transparently share their work, which is perhaps the greatest achievement as it relates to the slow and complex edge of culture and behaviour change…

Of course, it remains difficult to directly attribute any of these changes to the workshop itself but Eva seemed convinced that the latter did play a role in this series of change. That said, the workshop could have been even more effective if there had been a clearer and narrower problem statement at the onset of the workshop. But perhaps this was also a first broad brush stroke on Except’s knowledge work. It will need follow up.

Even for highly dynamic networked organisations like Except, which tend to anyway make intensive use of interrelated opportunities (the power of the network) and of knowledge flows across the branches and people in the organisation, a visioning workshop on identity and some work on knowledge management can reap critical seeds of change. Every subsequent iteration of this workshop – there is a plan to organise one such workshop every year – promises to sharpen the edge of knowledge of this extremely interesting and responsible organisation.

I wish for Except to keep reaping these seeds and turn them into the strong trees that echo its vision of sustainable organic and ecological development.

Related blog posts:

• Except in KM, accepting KM
• Get personal: KM closer, together, for the bigger picture
• Go organic, go civic! #KMalreadyHappensAnyways
• Harvesting insights (1): back to (KM) basics
• Harvesting insights (2): Beautiful KM

“]

Some 'shoots' to make ideas flower [photo credit: Clappstar/FlickR

It’s a very good idea on paper: something that works really well – in a specific location at a specific moment – should be replicated elsewhere, at a much larger scale. Hiccup! Hiccup hiccup! What about the context? What makes us think that we can scale that context up with the initiative that was successful? It wasn’t easy to achieve success, so isn’t it presumptuous to think we can replicate success at a (much) larger scale?

Successful development initiatives are indeed successful as a result of…

1. A combination of factors, e.g. strong will, a critical mass of capacities, sometimes a high level of resources, dense social and/or political capital (building trust and using it to move ahead in joint action), the presence or sufficient maturity of what is sometimes called ‘an enabling environment’ for that initiative.
2. A slow but high density process that combines all these factors. Because building trust, leveling knowledge, aligning visions, developing capacities, setting complex work in motion takes time. Paradoxically, this slow process goes together with a set of activities that happen at a much faster pace and in much more density than would probably be the case in the area normally (i.e. without that initiative).

Achieving that combination is very delicate – like a graft on a body or a very challenging turbo-gardening enterprise. We are deluding ourselves thinking that we can reproduce this harmonious set of factors on a much wider geographic or temporal scale – certainly given the current time frames of development projects: 2, 3, 5 or even 10 years.

Scaling up is not even a silver bullet, it’s the holy grail that everyone is after in development work. But rather than scale up successes (the fruits), we should focus on scaling up the processes that led to such successes (the soil). And perhaps we’re better off starting with cooperation, learning and facilitation of these social learning and cooperative processes. That is what prepares the soil for future plant embedding, the enabling environment that makes initiatives flourish.

I very much doubt that we can scale anything else up than that very ambition of ours to scale everything up. And we should scale that down. Small is beautiful, humble is laudable, slow is not shallow as we need time to know and grow…

Related blog posts:

• Look beyond WHAT to do: WHY and HOW lead to WHO
• What is good in a project?
• A new year of fun, focus, feedback and some new ideas

I wish you a year of great health, love, success but particularly of fun, focus and feedback! This has been my mantra for the past two years and I’ll stick to it for another year. And this year’s full of more than just fun focus and feedback.

More fun, focus and feedback in 2012 (photo credit: ILRI/Peter Ballantyne)

But before looking at some ideas for change, what’s in a mantra, really? What’s in this mantra? Time to explain perhaps…

FUN

We spend so much time at work that we might as well have some fun, especially when we work on complex and/or complicated issues. Since learning and knowledge management are a lot about changing behaviours, we’re much more likely to change them through fun. This is the extremely compelling argument behind the fun theory. And perhaps, contrary to what Cindy Lauper used to sing, not just girls want to have fun. I do too! How about you?

FOCUS

Now if we were just having fun we might forget what we’re having fun for. So this is the balancing factor to fun; the filling that makes the cake not only beautiful but also exquisite and memorable; the compass that brings the cool boat to its destination… You get the idea.

So fun is perfect, but it’s only an instrument that should be used to reach an objective, a purpose. Learning is all the more effective as it is consciously aiming at a specific objective.

Focus is also about dealing with only one thing at a time. While it makes sense to do strategic multi-tasking (keeping different balls up in the air, or keeping your eggs in different baskets, to avoid depending on one initiative/partner/client only), it is counter-productive to do operational multitasking – dealing with emails, yammer, blogging, talking on the phone, writing an article at the same time. This is the key point of Leo Babauta in his Focus manifesto. And I believe he’s right.

FEEDBACK

Now this one sounds perhaps less obvious and yet it is perhaps the most powerful of the three pillars in this mantra. If we are to learn, we need to continually adjust what we are doing towards the intended focus. This is the powerful effect of feedback loops that among others Owen Barder has explained in a blog post about improving development policy.

Feedback has value on both sides of its coin:

• Given possibly negatively but constructively, it informs us on what we do not so well and need to question and readjust;
• Given positively it confirms that we are on the right track and reinforces good practices. Not insignificantly it also boosts our confidence in ourselves and in the feedback giver, it builds trust. And it liberates energy, which can be channelled to more fun and focus…

So give feedback relentlessly, either for learning and change or just as a token of appreciation to the others. In a way, the only truly great present you can give others is your presence. And feedback is a great way of manifesting your presence, as a result of observing, listening and caring. Here are some tips for feedback that works.

So I wish you all three in 2012 and also the powerful combination that they make and personally ignites me all year long.

Now, for the new ideas of 2012, here are a few things around this blog I want to give a try in 2012 – your feedback is much appreciated, as ever:

• Write more but also some shorter blog posts, the tumblers that echo what John Tropea does with his TumblR posts;
• Interview people about KM, learning, communication and perhaps occasionally invite guest blogging;
• Feature more videos and presentations that I have prepared or fished around on the internet;
• Continue with my stock-taking series. One is due on facilitation basics soon;
• Do more event and publication commenting;
• And perhaps overhaul the design again. Time to shake off the grey and black frames, don’t you think?

And I have a few other ideas in petto but hey, let’s keep this rolling little by little…

Have a wonderful 2012!

Related blog posts:

• Channelling energy: how do we realise, transform and accomplish ourselves?
• Question your education and educate your questions
• Merry Christmas – see you next year!

So, the three main branches of the family have been mapped out (1): communication, knowledge management and monitoring. But as in any fascinating family, the engagement family has lots of extended branches that enrich the colourful engagement family tree. Here are just a few more that are worth considering:

Capacity development (image: AmuDarya basin)

The Capacity development branch. This branch aims at beefing up the potential of people to do their job better. And since work is better done together, it also focuses on engagement to get more people in its network. This part of the family kept changing names through history. It was originally known as training but its members said it was too restrictive a name for what the whole family does – so the first son kept that name but the whole family itself was re-baptised capacity building, but then it was accused of suggesting that capacity had to be built from scratch. So it became capacity development.

• Training remains the most prominent son. Under pressure, however, it changed its approach. Where it used to bring people together intensively for two to three weeks, it now invites people for a couple or more days but repeats this exercise across a more extensive period and with more sustained interactions in and between training sessions. It seems to work out better for him now: Engagement around a process rather than just an event. Despite those more recent changes, it is still challenged by other branch members.
• A sister in the lot is coaching. She has been around for a long time, in fact a much longer time than training although in the old age she was rather known as mentoring and apprenticeship. Her objective is to follow the practice of people over much longer time, to assess that practice in situ, identify good practices and provide a safe space to make mistakes and improve; her approach thus aims at giving better advice, going more deeply in the perspective of excelling at a function and of benefitting from others’ experience. Coaching is thus all about deep, not wide engagement.
• Quite a few even younger siblings are coming to light: exchange visits, job rotation etc. For this branch of the family, learning is also essential. And it has become increasingly virtual in the past few years. The capacity development branch has been in touch with the distance learning relatives and this is really bringing engagement across various means of communication. Some are jealous of the booming business of this branch – certainly in the development/cooperation arena.

Organisational Development

In contrast, the organisational development branch is not enjoying much wind in its sails these days. It is very close to the organisational learning brother in the KM family and it is basically concerned with all the ways that an organisation can perform more effectively. In fact, some argue that this is not really a branch in its own but rather a clan bringing different relatives together from the KM, communication, capacity development and monitoring branches.

• The one person that rallies all of them under this banner however is the ambitious organisational leadership. Driven by entrepreneurship, this cocky lad is quite happy to shine brightly and show its managerial capacities. But it does so with a purpose: to bring the organisation to the next level. So it’s not pure flash and tack. He knows that without having a sincere goal that transcends self interest, it will never manage to bring the people that form organisation to that next level – so engagement has to be its mantra.
• To ease this job, he is backed by his more distant cousin group dynamics, who knows how to get teams to work together and contribute to the bigger organisation. It is easier to rely on well-functioning teams than high individual performers only. Yet it’s still not enough.
• Organisational learning is thus part of this family enterprise to make sure that group dynamics works in accordance with the goal and perceives the value of its successful efforts and the lessons of its not so successful ventures.
• Change management also joins the club sometimes, to give advice from a system perspective, because the branch realises that it’s not possible to develop an organisation without adopting a broader perspective of systemic change. He is however much more related to the next branch of the family, the institutional change.

Some views on this branch even relate it to action research. It’s unclear where exactly this branch fits… and it is handing over to…

Institutional development

The Institutional change branch: close to the ‘organisational development’ branch, this family has a slightly broader look. It really aims at having a wider effect than the organisational clan. This branch believes in large scale engagement and logically talks a lot about systems thinking, change management and complexity. Subsequently, it is sometimes accused of being delusional (‘how can you achieve change at such a large scale?’) or too intellectual (‘you and your systems!‘). But for all this, it is enjoying a great wave of popularity at the moment.

• The patriarch of this branch is institutional development. He is a reformed organisational development relative who has decided to branch out and look outside the organisational box. He quickly perceived the importance of the context surrounding the organisation if change is the overall objective. Engagement was in his DNA and he first looked at the edges of the organisation: the networks and personal relations that evolve as conscious or unconscious satellites of the organisation. He moved into networks and foundations, collective units of organisation, including legal aspects (statutes) etc. He has now brothers and sisters that adequately complement his ambitions technically and ethically.
• Multi-stakeholder processes are the twin brothers and sisters that want to bring all kinds of people together to connect, learn and act together. They are very demanding, they eat a lot of resources (time and money) and they really need someone to help facilitating their interactions. But they offer a relatively practical solution for this branch’s objectives of wide scale engagement. Next to institutional development’s approach of changing organisations, they propose to combine forces between organisations; and that just fits the family ethos.
• Social change is the turbulent little sister. She cries for social justice, she craves freedom, empowerment and engagement in favour of the (more) socially-deprived. Engagement is her main strategy and she wants to mobilise all her family members to help in this. She’s not considered very serious by some family members, but she knows that some extraordinary figures from the past are on her side, the likes of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And she also knows that focusing on changing people one by one is a long but right track to flip institutions over too.

A family in transition?

It’s worth noting a few trends affecting the main families of engagement:

In the main communication branch, two trends are moving things around. Every family evolves over time to espouse the zeitgeist and practical arrangements that come with it:

• On the one hand, the communication branch is going ‘strategic’. This is the new motto to bring all family members in the same car for a journey to visit their contacts (their audiences) and have them come together as one, to align their methods and skills. In practice, having all members onboard does not mean that they play a melodious tune together. And the journey can be quite chaotic. But you have to praise the comms family for its intention to have one whole family experience. There’s chances that if they keep doing such journeys, one day they will play a beautiful tune together.
• On the other hand when the family goes on a journey to developing countries, and perhaps as a result of going ‘strategic’, the communication family is really moving away from their original ‘messages’ approach. It was too uni–directional. They have all realised to some extent the value of genuine bilateral engagement.
• Some elements of the family are coming back in the picture. It’s the case with coaching but also with the wild cousin storytelling mentioned in the previous ‘happy families’ post. is actually an age-old family member who’s been passing through the history of his engagement relatives time and time again to tell his tales and disappear again. He is celebrated again these days – is it yet another hype or is storytelling going to stick around this time?

Finally, much could be said about all the other clans evolving next to the engagement family. Some commenters mentioned artistic expression, psychology, I would add humour and jokes and all kinds of other related groups that gravitate around the engagement family and other families too.

At the end of the day, regardless of the specific portrait of each family, and regardless of their current and possible future transitions, what matters is that all these families contribute to more engagement across the board and in a networked way. In this sense, the elephant in the room that Harold Jarche mentioned in a post about managing engagement is perhaps indeed the networked approach that all engagement family branches are trying to follow, consciously or not. But perhaps the real elephant in the room is the collective sense-making and mobilisation of energies directed at a wider goal – in this sense social change is perhaps leading the pack.

But we’re not quite there yet, neither in the networked ways nor in the networked social change. Now we’re still at the stage of nurturing engagement, and such a family seems on the right path. For what good and what worth offers a family if not a place to develop deep relationships, trust in each other and trust in life, starting with the most basic steps of engagement?

Notes:

1. Again, this family tree does not pretend to be exhaustive nor the way to look at engagement.

Related blog posts:

• Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement
• A simple KM and communication strategy… with double focus on the context
• Get personal: KM closer, together, for the bigger picture
• Rethinking facilitation and engagement
• Communicating inside to learn outside?

I wish you a great end of year and Christmas celebrations if that’s appropriate for you.

Before I leave you, I want to thank all of you who have shared reflections, information, inspirations this past year. You are what makes this blog my favourite online hobby and I hope we will engage ever more next year. I also hope the quality of my blogging will improve to make this place a more inspiring and pertinent space for you!

And on a final note, here is the top 10 blog posts that have scored the highest amount of views in 2011 – whether justifiably or not:

1. Learning cycle basics and more: Taking stock
2. Settling the eternal semantic debate: what is knowledge, what is information…
3. Cycles, circles and ripples of learning
4. Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement
5. Storytelling: Taking stock
6. Radical ideals and fluffy bunnies
7. The ever learning organisation
8. Harvesting insights (2): Beautiful KM
9. KISS my comms
10. Network monitoring & evaluation: Taking stock

Connecting inspiration learning - @Cosmocat's expectation

That is a very valuable goal for a workshop, but why exactly this combination? And how does it tie in together, if it does at all? The question really is worthwhile, considering the amount of workshops, conferences and other events that most of us attend in a typical year; and considering that most of us probably would share any or all of these expectations at different times. So how and when exactly do we connect, find inspiration and learn at events?

Inspiration happens without any physical contact – instead of us, our hearts, minds and souls mingle and meet with their environment. Inspiration could rush out of hearing a quote, relating something that happens with a totally separate event or memory, seeing a new combination possible. In an event, it could just be about finding a presentation excellent, hearing a very good speaker or a very astute question, seeing the possibility of bringing two people to know each other… Inspiration is thus essentially a personal unilateral experience, it does not require someone else. Though of course, a someone else would very likely stimulate inspiration much further, especially if contact and dialogue with that someone else is sustained. Hence connecting…

Connecting has two meanings: a) getting in contact and b) establishing a (somewhat deeper) connection. Let’s not focus on the former here because it does not say anything about thoughts or emotions.  The second meaning of ‘connecting’ implies that it happens with the awareness that a deeper connection is being established. We connect with someone and we realise it. Like the blink moment that Malcolm Gladwell was talking about. Thus connecting happens either when two people meet, hear each other’s ideas/emotions/inspirations (and their minds/hearts/souls mingle) and acknowledge that they share a common experience or appreciation. Connecting requires interaction and that interaction can take various shapes during an event:

• We come to workshops to hear and meet specific persons based on previous connections or based on these people’s work/fame and we interact with their presentations or speeches;
• We meet other people as part of workshop group work and we find those connections when working together;
• We meet people through common acquaintances, when we are introduced to someone else and may have that ‘blink’ moment (or not);
• We just end up meeting a lot of people in random situations when chatting at coffee and lunch breaks, during outings, for some when having a smoke etc. Again a case of blink or not. But it goes beyond the spur of inspiration.

Now learninghappens on the brink of inspiration and on the basis of connection. Inspiration is (sometimes) what makes learning possible, because it excites curiosity and opens our shell for new experiences. Inspiration makes way for connection: the enlightening or blinding moment leads the way to the bridging moment. Once the bridge is established between two newly connected people, learning between them can happen. The pearls of social learning reveal themselves when inspiration meets connection.

Learning also brings the experience one step further. Inspiration could be just a glimpse, a shooting star. Connecting could be just a very enjoyable moment of chat. Learning, however, is a transformative experience that can only happen when other elements are conjured up. From blinding to bridging to binding.

“]

Weaving the pearls of learning with inspiration & connection [Photo: Ash-S_FlickR

Chahira, what was your verdict of #OEB11 then?