A life full of (not always mindful) harvest

This is something I didn’t see coming, at first. And yet this theme was around all along. My entire life through. From the moment when facing my plate with avid eyes, I heard “don’t have eyes bigger than your stomach”. Right there! The tone was set, the message settled: “how much can you handle?” And …

All hail grit power (= determination + discipline)!

One of the most famous pieces of behavioral research ever conducted is the ‘Stanford marshmallow experiment‘  What this shows? The power of discipline. And determination. Grit! Having an eye on the long game rather than instant gratification…  That’s one of the things I’m teaching my kids. Intelligence sure helps, but when it comes to succeeding …

Slow thinking and triple loop learning for our high-paced online metamorphosis

In her preface to a great series of posts on moving online in pandemic, our iconic and highly inspirational friend Nancy White made this revealing statement: In typical Nancy fashion I jumped into action, started up an email list, opened a Google Doc to share resources, responded to individual requests for help. Boing, boom, zip, …

The little secrets of collaboration: When empathy finally flips ‘Me’ over to ‘We’

Collaboration often starts off from a place where a collection of relatively self-centred individuals decide to work together. The self-centredness is not a problem per se, it’s a fact. Though I was recently reminded in a Blink about ‘Ego is the enemy‘ that one can be unreasonably self-centred too but that’s a digression). In any …

What really is the value of feedback?

Happy new year everyone! I hope 2019 brings you health and well-being, happiness, peace, fun, inspiration and success! I also hope it brings you and us all lots of opportunities to get better at feedback. Both giving and receiving it. When I developed my motto ‘fun, focus and feedback‘, I didn’t expect that this third …

The ‘meta’ reflex, that little knowledge ‘extra’ that makes a difference

My head is still boggling about the relation that some people can have with time. Particularly about what they do with time, this fascinating uber-theme of humanity alongside with love, death and the meaning of life. I’ll be blogging a couple of posts about time. Starting today with this: the little extra time that smart workers …

Knowledge management – a visual guided tour of ‘KM as a mindset’

Last week I was invited to help a group unravel the mysteries of knowledge management. It was a great opportunity to intervene both as facilitator and subject matter specialist. Triggered by the opportunity to connect with my main area of expertise I quickly realised I was hit by the ‘curse of knowledge’ ie. how could …

What is KM? Really…

I pondered this a couple of days ago: when I have to explain to someone that I don’t know what I do (at least for the knowledge management part of my work), despite previous attempts I still struggle. Off the cuff this is what came up to me, when thinking about describing my KM work. …

Linking knowledge management with monitoring and evaluation

A short while ago, I gave a small brown bag seminar on the connections between knowledge management (KM) on the one hand and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) on the other hand, for a group of people from the Centre for Development Innovation (CDI) and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), both located in …

Ban info-dumping and think carefully how much information you can handle

The paradox of the knowledge age is that we feel ever more lost with information and our capacity to filter it, and yet… We always want more, more and more of it. But as much as slow-food and eco-citizen trends are teaching us (again and again), the best can be the enemy of the good …