This slideshare production simply and concisely presents the value of blogs to enhance reflective practice.

Brent Uncategorized blogs, elearning reflective blogs, Organizations, Personal Learning Environment

This key point made by Harold Jarche that reminds me of the key theme at my social tech training “it’s not about the technology”!

Harold Jarche » The new nature of the firm

For enterprise 2.0 to work, it needs to embrace democracy in the workplace, something that rarely exists in industrial, command and control, organisations – which account for almost all of our businesses. Businesses run as monarchies or oligarchies but very few operate as democracies. We are so accustomed to this structure that most business people would say that it is impossible to run a business as a democracy. We know they are wrong and that there are democratic business models that work today.

I think that enterprise 2.0 will not fulfill its potential unless its foundation is more than just web technologies or networked businesses. We need to integrate this democratic organising principle into our discussions on enterprise 2.0 and I am sure that many captains of industry will loudly disagree. Without an architectural organising principle, the enterprise 2.0 ship will not sail very far.

photo by S.K.S.

Brent Uncategorized enterprise, Organizations

Here is an excerpt from Michele Martin’s Bamboo Blog. Her comments capture my experiences in facilitating a group of youthworkers in a workshop titled “Expanding Your Personal Toolkit“. I had a difficult time setting up the environment and conditions to reflect on how work was being done and what can you as a staff do differently to improve your work. I think some of the reasons for my difficult time ties into what Michele describes below. Creating new ways to facilitate staff to think outside the box and put aside for a minutes their long list of reasons why “you can’t do things like that in my work” is the most important step in designing this type of workshop.

One of my most consistent experiences in working with staff is
dealing with this resistance to change, which they readily see in other
people, but not in themselves. In their minds, change is something that
happens outside of themselves–it’s changes in management, in policies,
etc., rather than changes in individual professional practice that
could take place. My challenge, always, is to get them to see the
places where they can do things differently on their own, regardless of
what other people are doing. I have to help them see that it’s the
accumulation of their individual practices that creates change,
regardless of what’s happening around them. They can wait for the
“system” to change (and there are plenty of things in the system to
change), but they have to realize that they are part of the system.
Even if everything else operated differently, if they don’t start
making some different choices about their individual behavior, the
system isn’t moving anywhere. Read more…….

Brent Uncategorized Organizations, resistance change

A friend is experiencing some of the dynamics and unique weirdness in
behaviour that stems from the Founder Syndrome. I had a few excellent
reference documents that I shared with her. The first is called:
Founder’s Syndrome: How Corporations Suffer — and Can Recover and the second is called: Founder’s Syndrome – Who Me?
The articles present an excellent explanation and point out some
options for Boards to follow when this type of situation arises.

Brent Uncategorized Organizations