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What Will I Be

April 9th, 2013
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I’m trying to design a new website that reflects what I want to do over the next few years. I am a bit stuck because I don’t really want to use my blog as a business marketing site (not terribly good at that anyway) and I don’t want it just to be an aimless, wandering around site that stops and picks up the latest shiny objects. So what to do.

I saw Hugh McLeod’s latest cartoon today and it helped with my dilemma. I will have a bit of business, a bit wandering around, a bit of pontificating about what I think and a bit of fun. In other words it will be mine and that’s good enough for me.

Brent Uncategorized

Shaping the Organization’s Culture

April 5th, 2013
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There’s a huge culture conversation that’s just beginning. It’s going to be huge. And exciting.

Are you ready to have it…?  - Hugh MacLeod

This cartoon by Hugh MacLeod and his short text summary points to a greater interest and readiness to tackle culture.
In my work with non profit organizations, I’m noticing that the Boards of Directors are talking more and more about how staff performance often doesn’t live up to the culture of the organization. These discussions are often in talks about staff moral, poor decision making, staff complaints, managing inter-staff conflict etc.
These discussion had me reflecting on the capacity of the organization’s leadership to shape the organization’s culture. It seems like in the past at least there was a  great reluctance to discuss and even think about shaping culture. I think this is changing as we grapple with some of the negative side effects of not shaping our culture. Figuring out how best to do that shaping is the new challenge. I welcome it.

Brent Uncategorized

My Normal – stories from children with rare diseases

February 14th, 2013
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I’m very pleased to share news on the launch of My Normal, stories from children with rare diseases. Emma Rooney designed and developed the My Normal project based on her lived experience of growing up with Gaucher disease.

Through the National Gaucher Foundation of Canada, Emma was a recipient of a 2011 Genzyme Patient Advocacy Leadership Award (PAL Awards). The PAL Awards program seeks to spark innovation in disease awareness programs and patient support initiatives around the world.

I’m proud to have been part of the project team that developed and launched this very exciting and important resource for children and their families. My Normal provides an online space for children (and their families) to share their stories of living with a rare disease.

On the website, Emma’s shares her story of coping and growing with Gaucher disease. In sharing her story, Emma both models and invites children with any rare disease to share an anecdote, photo, poem etc. about their experience of living with a rare disease.

The illustrations in the video story, Emma’s Garden: Growing with Gaucher are beautiful drawn by Emma’s sister Megan, a professional artist living in London England.

Please share this resource with anyone you know in your network who lives with or affected by a rare disease. Below is a short preview of Emma’s Garden: Growing with Gaucher. If you want to go directly to the full version you can click here.

 

Brent Uncategorized , ,

Jay Cross – 2012′s Top Articles on Working Smarter

December 29th, 2012
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The Internet Time Alliance and Jay Cross are magical. I can’t go wrong in following Jay and the troupe at the ITA. Here is Jay’s top articles for 2012. This will make for a great review and a kick start for my 2013 year.
Working Smarter Daily points to ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more. These disciplines add up to what I call “working smarter.”

Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines. Every day, Working Smarter Daily uses social signals to select the top articles from blogs in these fields. Here’s how. And here are the top articles from this year:

 

 

Brent Uncategorized

Social Media Revolution 2013 & Jane Hart’s 2012 Blog Picks

December 28th, 2012
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It’s time to get back to work. My website has been quiet long enough. I’ll end the 2012 year with an updated version of the famous Social Media Revolution 2013 video produced by Eric Qualman.

Thanks goes to Jane Hart – Learning in the Social Workplace, for posting this new version on her site. She has posted a list of outstanding moments in the 2012 social learning world and I’ve pasted those highlights below the video.

 

Here is Jane’s year ending post with key highlights of the 2012 year.

In the first of two reviews of 2012, here are the 10 most popular posts on my own blog this year – based on viewing stats, tweets and FB likes. Shown in order of popularity, with the most popular first.

1 - The Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 list is revealed

On 1 October 2012 I revealed the results of the 6th Annual Survey of Tools for Learning – the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 – and provided a brief analysis of the results

2 - 10 things to remember about social learning (and the use of social media for learning)

In March 2012 I participated  in the #lscon chat, where there was some discussion about social learning, so I tweeted a few of my own thoughts and repeated them here in this post

3 - Only 14% think that company training is an essential way for them to learn in the workplace

That was one of the findings of  a survey I ran in April 2012 on how people learn best in the workplace. In this blog post, I shared the data from my survey, some of my thoughts about the results, and the importance of undertaking your own survey.

4 - A new framework for supporting learning and performance in the social workplace

In this post in March 2012 I proposed my Workplace Development Services (WDS) framework to help organisations understand the range of new services and activities that will be required that are focused on supporting continuous performance improvement and learning in the workflow as people do their jobs.

5 - The future belongs to those who take charge of their own learning

In October 2012 I posted about the importance of being proactive about your own professional development and acquiring new knowledge and skills on your own, since despite the training you have received in your job, you may well find you have fewer marketable skills than when you started.

6 - The role of the Enterprise Learning Community Manager #elcm

In July 2012 I talked about the role of the Enterprise Learning Community Manager – someone who encourages social connections and fosters a sense of belonging to an enterprise community of learner, for the purpose of supporting and improving performance in the workplace.

7 - Collaboration and community skills are the new workplace skills

In February 2012 I posted about the new social and collaboration skills that workers will require in the workplace, and how we can help them acquire them – not by training people to be social, but by modelling these new behaviours.

8 - Emerging new roles for learning and performance professionals

In November 2012 I talked about some of the new roles that that will be required to support individuals and teams as they organize and manage their own learning and performance needs.

9 - The differences between learning in an e-business and learning in a social business

In August 2012 I wrote a long post that included a chart where I summarised some of the fundamental differences in thinking and practice between “learning in an e-business” and “learning in a social business” – and how it can be supported.

10 - The key to informal learning is autonomy

In this post in April 2012 I explained that, for me, the key to informal learning is where the locus of control lies.. With informal learning, it is you, the individual, who are in control.

 

December 27th, 2012 | Category: Articles | 10 comments

 

Brent Uncategorized

My “Go to” Authors for Work and Learning

September 5th, 2012
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It’s been a busy summer. There were trips to the cottage, a few sightseeing excursions out of town, family celebrations and even a bit of work in-between all the socializing.

Throughout the summer, I managed to stay connected to my favourite authors (bloggers) who write so well on subjects I’m deeply interested in and use in my work and professional development.

I’m constantly focused on learning how to help groups and workers be better at what they do and achieve improved results with social technologies. The three bloggers I’m featuring in this post, stimulate my learning and enable me work more effectively with clients.

Here are a few brief descriptions and excerpts from Harold, Jane and Jay’s websites.

Harold Jarche- life in perpetual beta: A key topic in Harold’s extensive list of blog categories is Personal Knowledge Management or PKM. I like the PKM framework because it is so applicable to the needs of knowledge workers. PKM also helps me fine tune my skills as I work with others. You can sign up for online PKM workshops with Harold.

In this post titled “Basic Skills for Net Work” Harold provides a simple and practical list of PKM skills that can help workers and organizations.

Here are some questions that personal knowledge management can address:

How do I keep track of all of this information? >> start small

How do I make sense of changing conditions and new knowledge? >> curation

How can I develop and improve critical thinking skills? >> Observe, Participate, Challenge, Create

How can we cooperate? >> freely share

How can I collaborate better? >> learn out loud

How can I engage in problem-solving activities at the edge of my expertise? >> net work skills

Jane Hart – Learning in the Social Workplace: Jane is world famous for her Top 100 Tools for Learning which she publishes yearly. She is also a team member in the Internet Time Alliance along with Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn and Paul Simbeck-Hampson.

Facilitating Collaborative Learning  - a recipe for success is a recent article she wrote for the e.learning age magazine. In this article she describes her experiences of online workshops she has been offering at the Social Learning Centre , a global online community for learning professionals.

Her recipe (co-developed with Harold Jarche) is a priceless guideline for fostering collaborative learning in the workplace. The post also emphasized the shift from a training mindset to the more informal social learning mindset for performance results.

I’m facilitating informal online learning with several groups so I’m really learning a lot from her recipe.  When you read the full post and you will see why Jane’s perspective is so relevant.

A more effective social approach, however, is where the content is well-integrated within the community, and in fact co-created by the community, and where the emphasis is placed much more on the interactions, knowledge sharing and conversations of the participants – than on the content per se.

Jay Cross – Internet Time Alliance: Jay’s work is so rich in content and innovative ideas, I’m not sure where to start. I especially like how Jay writes about how the business world is evolving and in many cases de-constructing.

In a January 2012 post titled “No More Business as Usual”, Jay succinctly describes the pains experienced by the business sector and points to new trends that offer a way through the maelstrom. Here is how Jay describes the state of business.

“This is business.” — Vito Corleone, The Godfather

Business is changing, and the learning function must change along with it.

Rigid, industrial-age corporations are not keeping up with the pace of change. Customer Spring, Shareholder Spring, and Worker Spring may break out any day. Everyone’s mad as hell. They won’t take it any more.

How bad is it? The lifespan of corporations is at an all-time low. The majority of workers are frustrated, unhappy, and disengaged. Shareholders are receiving a lower return on investment than ever before. Customers are fed up with mediocre service. Return on assets has declined every year for the last forty. The only class of people making money are CEOs, and there’s general agreement that their rewards are obscene and inappropriate. We can’t go on like this.

I have many more people in my “go-to” list of authors however, Harold, Jane and Jay are at the top of my list as they get at the key issues I’m challenged with in my work and learning.

Brent Uncategorized

Dear Non-profit Funder – Please fund my social media strategy!

June 25th, 2012
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An Executive Director of an non profit organization program asked me for a some ideas on what a social media strategy might look like. She was preparing for a meeting with a government funder and wanted to be ready for questions about her plans to develop and implement a social media strategy.

I sent her a quick email giving her an overview of what I believe is an effective approach to developing a social media strategy. On reflection, I decided to write up an expanded version of my response as a blog post. I thought it was a good example of how an everyday communication can be re-purposed. Posting my response in my blog also helps me solidify my thinking as I narrate my work.

What’s a Social Media Strategy? (my expanded snapshot response)

You can think of your social media strategy as your organization’s online communications strategy. Within your organization, you have your services, users, staff, funders, partners, supporters, different departments (if you are a large organization) and general visitors to your site.

When you develop your social media strategy you look at all parts (above) of your organization and strive to integrate your social strategy into your operations within and outside the organization. Your overarching social media policies and goals you create are the foundation for developing and driving your social media strategy.

I emphasized that your social strategy is much more than promoting (marketing) your agency although increased awareness can be an indicator that connects to the goals you are trying to achieve. To help her see how goals are the foundation of your social media strategy I provided a few examples.

With Your Social Strategy You Want to: (your goals)

  • Increase your audience and reach of your organization so that your online funding campaigns connect with intended audiences and result in an increase in the funds received from donors, partners, supporters and government funders;
  • Increase or improve the quality, efficiency and quantity of the services you deliver so your target communities are better served;
  • Increase and deepen your relationships in and outside the organization to attract and retain highly motivated and skilled staff which in turn adds to long term sustainability of your organization;
  • Increase your capacity to be an open, transparent organization that listens to stakeholders and engages them in meaningful dialogue so services are improved;
  • Increase your organizational capacity to innovate and respond to complex challenges by: encouraging listening, sharing, collaboration and innovation with social tools and fostering (rewarding) a culture that promotes staff innovation, critical thinking and problem solving;

So with those goals – social media is not just a strategy but a mindset about how you relate to your work and how you want to improve the outcomes of your your work.

The social media tools you employ are important but the thinking and planning – which you do so well as a Non profit Executive Director is what makes your social media strategies work.

Also, your social media strategy (and your own learning) is always evolving as you test, learn and make sense of what’s happening as you communicate with your audiences.

Your social media strategy is a central part of this process and is designed to reach those goals. You (as Executive Director) need to think in terms of how Social Media will accomplish or contribute to your organization’s goals.

So many organizations slap up a YouTube or twitter channel and don’t think through why or what they want to accomplish or how they will measure or know what’s happening or even worse, who is going to put up the content for my social media and respond to questions and comments that follow.

That was a very quick overview of what I think of when it comes to the question “what’s a social media strategy”. I’d love to hear what others think about the starting points for a social media strategy.

In closing, I’ll give huge props to “Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization by Olivier Blanchard. His book helped me dispel so many myths and assumptions about social media strategies for businesses and non profits. Also, Harold Jarche’s writing on personal knowledge management informs me everyday about the importance of narrating your work.

Brent Uncategorized

Visual Media (video/photos) – A Direct Route to Social Media Adoption

May 17th, 2012
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My work is mostly about helping organizations integrate social media into their culture (mindset) communication strategies, policies and services.

Lately, I’ve come to realize that integrating visual media like video and photos is an equally effective route for organizations to keep pace with their digitally progressive social customers,clients and employees.

Even prior to my decision to leave my 25 years of community development and youth work I was enamoured with video, audio and photography. I saw these tools as a great way to engage youth and communities and to encourage personal growth. As I took on more and more work involving visual media, I realized that I just couldn’t get by with your basic, low cost video/photo equipment.  The emergence of  professional style video cameras priced for everyday users compelled me to step up and purchase one of these beautiful cameras.

What I settled on was the Sony NEX 5n mirrorless compact system camera (not a DSLR but a CSC). Having this camera has turned me on to a whole new world of video and photography. Not only can I produce high quality video and photos for clients, I can help practitioners use visual media to add to their professional development and the service performance of their organization.

The reviews on the Sony NEX 5n camera are outstanding. It’s intelligent auto feature is so well designed it puts the stress of learning new technical information to rest. I can take my time to learn all the manual options while shooting great video or photos with the auto setting on.

Here is a quick description and link to the EOSHD a DSLR website that gives an in-depth review and comparison between the Sony NEX  5n and the Panasonic GH2 cameras. The comparison focuses on low light video recording.

The Sony NEX 5N is the first DSLR* from Sony that offers manual control in video mode and 24p. It precedes the higher end Sony A77 and NEX 7 by about 2 months and is priced at just $599 for the body only. The 18-55mm OSS kit lens is video optimised and has a very effective optical stabiliser. A 50mm F1.8 OSS prime will follow soon (I tried one at IFA, it’s great to finally have a stabiliser on a fast prime!) and the OLED viewfinder add-on.

* I use the term DSLR as an umbrella term for cameras now – when technically the new Sonys are SLT or mirrorless compact system cameras (CSC).

I highly recommend this camera for professional or personal use. The price is reasonable and it produces outstanding video and photos. If your agency or business is looking for good quality and an easy to learn camera, this one delivers on so many levels.

Brent Uncategorized

Visual Media (videos and photos) on Your Website

May 3rd, 2012
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Research is clearly demonstrating how visual media like video and photos significantly adds to an organization’s impact and outcomes. Would you like to use quality visual media on your website but don’t have the staff resources to take on this important communications task?

Here are a few ways that visual media can help your organization or business:

  • Sharing powerful stories that communicates your unique mission or purpose;
  • Building a feeling of value and trust for your organization in your audiences;
  • Enhancing and supporting staff training/professional development;
  • Capturing knowledge acquired at workshops that you can repurpose at a later time;
  • Integrating visual media into your overall business communication strategy;

Through my company, Social Media Tools for Work and Learning, I help organizations improve their performance and long term outcomes. My 25 years of managing community organizations combined with ten years of social media experience gives me a unique appreciation for the challenges faced by the social service and business sector.

I love to use photos and videos that tell powerful stories that inspire and energise. Visual media can help extend the reach of your organization to build membership, increase awareness, broaden your funding base and deepen relationships in and outside your organization.

You can view and download my Visual Media Services flyer below (PDF). The flyer will give you a quick overview of the value and benefits of using visual media on your website.

If you are interested in learning more about my video media services, I would be pleased to chat with you.

Visual Media Services – Brent MacKinnon

Brent Uncategorized

Moneyball – A Lesson in Social Artistry

March 17th, 2012
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Background:

Michele Martin (The Bamboo Project) and I are hosting the Social Artistry Virtual Knowledge Cafe. We have over 50 people from around the world join our nine week virtual cafe. Through our exploration and shared learning we hope that as practitioners we can discover some common threads that will enhance our our work with communities and groups.

Here is how Dr. Jean Huston describes social artistry.

Social artistry is) the art of enhancing human capacities in the light of social complexity. It seeks to bring new ways of thinking, being and doing to social challenges in the world.

…Social Artists are leaders in many fields who bring the same order of passion and skill that an artist brings to his or her art form, to the canvas of our social reality.

Etienne Wenger says that social artistry is:

knowing how to use who you are as a vehicle for opening spaces for learning. . .it’s about being able to use who I am to take my community to a new level of learning and performance.

I was struck by how the movie Moneyball, had so many social artistry themes in the story. So to unpack my reflections, I wrote up how I saw social artistry skills and attributes at work within the movie.

Moneyball – A Lesson in Social Artistry

Read more…

Brent Uncategorized