Full Circle Associates

(Yes, I’m  popping my head up after a month of  heavy work and little inclination to stay at my computer as summer finally arrived in Seattle.)

I have long been a fan of learning from failures. In college, a friend of mine told me the day before I graduated, “I never met anyone who could fall down and get up so quickly.” When I picked up on Dave Snowden’s “safe-fail” experiment language I said YEAH!

Last month I happened upon a post by Chris Corrigan on just this topic. It was juicy and relevant. I work with many professionals for whom the risk of looking anything less than competent is not an option. This is a barrier. Chris sees this too.

The pressure that comes from perfection and maintaining a failsafe environment is a killer, and while we all demand high levels of accountability and performance, working in a climate where we can fail-safe provides more opportunity to find creative ways forward that are hitherto unknown.

My first line strategy is to role model. When I’m uncertain, I talk about it. When I am not sure something will work, I position it as an experiment. Just a shift in language can change the environment for risk.

Chris gets at this more clearly.

1. Be in a learning journey with others. While you are working with people, see your work as a learning journey and share questions and inquiries with your team.

2. Take time to reflect on successes and failures together. We are having a lovely conversation on the OSLIST, the Open Space facilitator’s listserv about failures right now and it’s refreshing to hear stories about where things went sideways. What we learn from those experiences is deep, both about ourselves and our work.

3. Be helpful. When a colleague takes a risk and fail, be prepared to setp up to help them sort it out. My best boss ever gave us three rules to operate under: be loyal to your team, make mistakes and make sure he was the first to know when you made one. There was almost nothing we could do that he couldn’t take care of, and we always had him at our backs, as long as he was the first to hear about it. Providing that support to team members is fantastic.

4. Apologize together. Show a united front, and help make amends when things go wrong. This is a take on one of the improv principles of making your partner look good. It is also about taking responsibility and having many minds and hearts to put to work to correct what needs correcting. This one matters when your mistake costs lives. Would be nice to see this more in the corporate world.

5. Build on the offer. Another improv principle, this one invites us to see what we just went through as an offer to move on to the next thing.

6. Don’t be hard on yourself. You can’t get out of a pickle if you are berating yourself up for being there. I find The Work of Byron Katie to be very very helpful in helping become clear about what to do next and to loosen up on the story that just because I failed, therefore I am a failure.

I like that last one. I am on part work/part vacation this week. I will have to practice that! Go for it. Don’t be chicken.

(Photo is mine from the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at the University of California, Davis)

I have been wanting an iPad for my graphic recording work but I just haven’t given in. (I’m also debating various ebook readers to cut down on paper. I have a book habit.) But I keep getting uncomfortable. George Siemens sums it up for me.

However, for those committed to openness, the iPad forces a clash between technolust and ideology. Perhaps we need a self-help group for people in a state of cognitive dissonance due to the impressive Apple technology, but less impressive stance on openness and end user control.

via elearnspace › iPad. Yes, it’s rather good.

(Reposted from the Technology for Communities blog)

Starting June 23rd for a couple of weeks, John Smith, Etienne Wenger and I will be part of a discussion about Digital Habitats on The Well’s Inkwell.Vue conference. Inkwell is a cool, public facing bit of the well (the rest is paid membership) that gives folks a chance to have an asynchronous conversation with book authors from or associated with the Well. We invite you to join into the conversation.

For those not familiar with the Well, it is one of the original and most enduring online communities. (I host the Virtual Communities conference there with Jon Lebkowsky!)

Inkwell is a great example of a “public facing space” for a private communities which is reflected in Digital Habitats chapter six as the “context” orientation. It gives outsiders a taste of the Well, which may invite them in, and it gives the Well a way to add value out to the world. Plus a few Well member volunteers get free review copies and encouragement to help stimulate the conversation, along with one or two designated conversation hosts. There have been some amazing conversations in Inkwell over the years, and it is now a Well tradition.

In preparation for the two weeks, the three of us thought it might be fun to record a short conversation to introduce ourselves. This is not what usually happens on Inkwell.vue, so we’ll see how it goes.

• Etienne, Nancy and John interview each other

Some of the questions we raised and which might be fodder for the Inkwell conversation include:

• Do you recognize yourself as a technology steward?
• And if you recognize yourself in the role, does it make a difference in practice?  Are there consequences in terms of relationships, labels, or intentions that change as a result?
• In your community do you see the tech steward  role as more individual or more distributed across community members?  What are the consequences?
• What can we learn from long-lived communities like The Well?
• How do technology stewardship practices vary across different socialcontexts?

For long time readers of this blog,  you know I’ve been obsessed with “signs of life” from communities which I call “community indicators.” I haven’t posted any recently, but something spurred me yesterday…

This past week I was very grateful to be a supporter of Dreamfish’s online retreat for their inaugural group of Dreamfish Fellows. The fellows will be taking leadership/stewardship roles in the Dreamfish network and communities over the next six month. As the first group, there was not only the exploration of a new group, but exploration of the roles they will play. All online, because cost and distance made a face to face a less “sustainable” option.

One of the Fellows, Kate McAlpine  shared some of her work with the Caucus for  Children’s Rights, in Tanzania

She shared a draft paper which I’ve still to read, but this graphic just “rang my bells.”  You’ll have to click into it to read it, and I’ve included the PDF for ease.

This sure is a community indicator in my eyes, capturing (or “reifying” – definition below!) the learning of a community of practice over time. In this case, the indicator is learning over time, and a way to VISUALIZE and SHARE that learning. That is the bit that really stands out for me.)

Attribution: Kate McAlpine (2009) Caucus for  Children’s Rights, Tanzania.

CCR Graphics_15Dec09

Any community indicators showing up in your life? Should we start thinking about network indicators?

Definition Time….Reification from Etienne Wenger (Wenger, E.  (1998).  Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) gleaned by a paper by Hildreth, 2002

: …to refer to the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness’ … With the term reification I mean to cover a wide range of processes that include making, designing, representing, naming, encoding and describing as well as perceiving, interpreting, using, reusing, decoding and recasting. (Wenger, 1998: 58-59)

Last week I was in Durban, South Africa, for the IST-Africa conference where Tony Carr, Maike Schansker and I ran a workshop on professional development in the networked/Web 2.0 era on behalf of UN University. One of the things Maike and I did during the second day was take graphic notes of the presentations.

The Purpose

We did visual capture for a number of reasons.

• First, from an academic conference perspective, note that there were 90 minute sessions with 5-7 papers presented each session in dark rooms with lots of (mostly) traditional PowerPoint. In a context of learning, the track we were following, it is interesting to see us yet again do what we tell teachers not to do. We wanted some form of participation for ourselves, beyond sitting and listening. (There was very limited opportunities for questions and dialog.)
• Second, we are both nurturing our graphic facilitating and recording practices, and in fact are part of a graphico’s community of practice! Maike was also practicing recording on her new electronic tablet.
• Third, the visual  recording helps me listen better, and to focus. (I have difficulty with this!)
• Finally, the practice provides a way to share some of what we learned out to the world.  It is a form of social reporting. We can share what we learned both with our own internal communities and (via things like Flickr) to the wider network.

I brought the sketches home, scanned them and uploaded them to Flickr, tagged them so I could group them together, and linked to our workshop’s wiki page (more on that in a subsequent post). Then I promptly forgot about them and moved on to the rest of my “been on travel” backlog.

Yesterday Stephen Downes picked up the photos and commented on them in his fabulous and widely read OLDaily. Hm… someone noticed! That is always interesting so I figured I should blog about the work and respond to some questions and comments I’ve gotten since Stephen’s post.

The Images…

…and a little self critique. I’ve embedded them below, but it is much easier to see if you click into Flickr itself! The drawing on pad on one’s lap leads to smaller, more detailed images than the large scale “drawing on walls” produces.

You will notice the different sketching styles of Maike and I, and the volume differences. Some presentations were jam packed. Some left us wondering what the key points were. I actually have three other pages with titles and the rest blank since I either could not follow, concentrate or I just “didn’t get it!”

As we looked at our pictures, we both noted we struggled to use more images and less words, and that for me, particularly, my images often got over-crowded. We were going so fast that most of the coloring work was during breaks or afterward. The presentations were so time limited that people talked fast and tried to pack a LOT into their 10 minutes.

The Method

Here are my materials:

• Nice, smooth and fairly heavy paper, left on the pad as  a hard writing surface
• Colored pens, Staedtler triplus(r) fineliner pens, 10 color set. Nice firm tips, fine lines and plenty of ink
• A small 12-color set of chalk pastels, Prismacolor Nupastel firm pastel color sticks. These are smaller and a bit harder than the low-cost chalk I use on my big, wall sized drawings. They give me a bit more fine control and I like the colors! Downside is they break easy so I try and pack them deep in my clothes in my suitcase!
• An old, grotty eraser.

Maike was using a new portable tablet PC and I’ll need to get the tech information from her if any of you are interested. We have been having some interesting conversations about both the tech and practice of electronic graphic recording.

Early on I decided on a “flow” template with the presentation title and presenter name in the upper left and cascading the notes to and fro down the page with arrows (later colored orange) as the connecting bits.  When I did the finishing touches later, I chose a fairly limited palette and used little “cloud thingies” to highlight key topics. You will also see that some images also used some mind-mapping techniques.

The Comments and Observations of Others

Stephen Downes  wrote:

These graphic lecture captures are invaluable teaching aids. Not simply because they represent the content of the lecture in an accessible format. But also because they make clear the structure of the presentation, a structure that should be very familiar to people who heard about the ‘the rule of threes’ I talked about in Argentina. Look at this one, for example. You can see the author employing some techniques – a pyramid, a four square diagram – to construct the overall presentation. Nancy White, Flickr, May 26, 2010 5:40 a.m.. [Link] [Tags: Accessibility, Africa, Flickr]

Wow, I never thought of the images this way. This is why we don’t work alone! I do want to be clear that some of the images, such as the one’s Stephen notes, are just my sketches of what the presenters had on their slides – so they get full credit AND I recognize that their device was useful to me as the listener. So great observation, Stephen, which you helped me see.

Emma Duke-Williams wrote:

But what fabulous diagrams, Nancy! I see they’re ‘public’, so I’ve passed them (& this page) on to some of our Study Skills folks – to see if they can use them to inspire students.

(I’m also wondering about the possibilities of creating something like that on a tablet, rather than having to remember the pencil case – and all the colours in it!)

Yes, Emma, they ARE public and that is an important part of our practice. A UN Agency funded my presence and participate, so in my eyes, what we learn, reify and produce goes back out to the world which funds the UN! But more fundamentally, it is a waste of resources and unsustainable to think that the benefits of conference participation in topics that are in the global public good are limited only to the privileged who can be face to face.

And yes, we can do this electronically. See these visual captures from Rachel Smith and Rob Cottingham (more) at Northern Voice earlier this month! I’m embedding one as an example from Rachel’s Northern Voice set on Flickr.  I try not to rush out and buy new electronic toys, but after playing with Rachel’s iPad, I’m VERY tempted. It was easier than Maike’s tablet PC.

So that is, as they say, the story as I know it! I’ll encourage Maike to chime in!