Season 1 of Learner Journeys

Over the past months I’ve been spending a lot of time learning something new. I dove into audio-recording, mixing, editing. I’ve tried to become a better interviewer. I’ve learned about the podcasting space that I’ve been an avid consumer of, but hadn’t known anything about the producing side. For the past decade, I’ve been listening to podcasts on almost every trip, dish-washing and cleaning moment, commute - you name it. But it wasn’t before Myriam Hadnes encouraged me to give it a try that I dared to cross the threshold into the production space.

The result of it was a public learning process that is now wrapped up with Season 1 of Learner Journeys. Public learning because I’ve learned a lot with each conversation that I recorded. Even if no-one ever listens to Learner Journeys, I’m incredibly thankful for the time and generosity of my guests on Season 1. I’ve taken a lot from each of those interviews. But public learning as well, because I’m learning with each episode how to better edit, how to better interview, how to better mix, how to fully use the technology I have access to.

If you haven’t yet, I would encourage you to listen to the conversations that are out and available.

With Tamara Thorpe, I spoke about her journey to be the trainer, coach and consultant she is today. What and who influenced her. What her fundamental approaches, perspectives and philosophies for facilitation are. It’s fun, insightful and heartwarming.

With Madi van Schalkwyk, I spoke about her activism in the Human Library South Africa. How she made the step from being a graphic designer into the social justice space. What she has learned from the human books and volunteers that she works alongside with in the Human Library. Her incredibly insightful, humble and generous thoughts on vulnerability, safety, authenticity and curiosity really stayed with me.

Justin Sitron is a professor for human sexuality, but we met years ago in the context of an international peace education organisation. His thoughts on learner centric and participatory facilitation in the context of formal education made be very hopeful about the potential of growth and transformative learning in spaces like school and universities.

My conversation with Tatyana Fertelmeyster was incredibly fun. She is a giant in the field of facilitation. A mutual friend once called her ‘a facilitator’s facilitator’. She tells stories about her work that are just a joy to listen to, but she connects them with profound insights about what learning needs, what learning is and how we can be of service to the people we accompany.

With Eileen Gricuk I spoke about the particularities of the one-on-one learning space: coaching. Eileen comes with a background in finance, but then changed towards her true calling of helping others learn and grow by becoming a coach. Now, she went back to school herself and is studying in Northern Ireland a course in conflict resolution and transformation. Her kindness, humility and the clarity of her thinking really touched me.

Joel Brown is many things: a trainer and coach, an academic teacher, a consultant, and a poet. We talked about his path to doing ‘the work’, as he calls it. Equality, justice, inclusion - helping others to rise up to their potential and challenge their perspectives with kindness, love and compassion. The episode ends with a spoken word poem that’ll blow your socks off (it certainly did blow off mine).

I’m very thankful to all my guests on season one for their time, their trust in me, their openness and their generosity.

I’m working now on Season 2. If you know someone who you think should definitely be a guest, let me know. I’d love to hear from voices outside my already existing circle of contacts. If you would like to be a guest on the show yourself - get in touch. It’s a great reason to put time in the calendar to talk about learning.

The start of a journey into something new

I’ve made something. You can listen to it.

The only job we’ve got

The only job of a Learning Experience Designer is to inject abstractions with humanity. 

That’s it. 

That’s all I really wanted to say. 

Ok - let me elaborate… 

A learning event, may that be a training course, a conference, a seminar or a workshop, is nothing but a few words on a piece of paper or a screen until it is taking place. It’s an entry in a calendar. It means nothing yet, really. Maybe it is filled with the expectations and intentions of the learner when they applied or registered to be a part of it. But I couldn’t know. 

A concept or a theory is also nothing real yet. Again, it might be filled with that the learner think it is, with their associations or assumptions. But I couldn’t know that either. 

What I do know is that abstractions are easy to ignore, easy to cancel, easy to disengage from, easy to dismiss. Human connection isn’t. 

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa developed a sociology of how people relate to the world (eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung) and the concept he built it around is resonance. That word, “resonance”, well, it resonates with me, maybe because I have seen him speak about it or because I (started to) read his book. For resonance to take place, both sides of the equation need to be able to move, to be changed by the other, to be alive. 

If we, as Learning Experience Designers want those concepts, theories or calendar-events to resonate with our participants, we need to inject them with humanity. 

We can use Slack or Facebook Groups or WhatsApp Groups or Webinars before the actual event to start building a community of learners. We can make ourselves as facilitators become real for our learners by being fully present, authentically enthusiastic and open to interact with the learners on an eye-to-eye level. 

We can build a Learning Journey during the event that is build around the reality of the learners and helps them go to where they need to get to (possibly using the Learner’s Journey approach). 

We can integrate the experience, knowledge and expertise of the learners into the learning process. And we can make sure that what people get out of the learning event helps them become who they aspire to be in their reality.

Let’s go inject that humanity in everything we do; it makes it better, I think. 

Bright, scary future

That’s the narrative that is going through the media, conferences, and conversations. Everyone is concerned about it (besides the companies that build and develop the robots and algorithms to take over said jobs). I have a different view on this. I think humans have taken up jobs that were meant for robots all along, because the robots weren’t good enough yet to do them competently. In a way, we’re just giving them back to them. 

Let’s go back in time; a while back, not dinosaur while, but a while. Before the industrial revolution, work was mainly done *in* small communities *for* those small communities. We were mostly farming, some of us where artisans, building the things that others needed, but almost all of us had a large, general set of transferrable skills. A lot of things were really bad in this time: life-expectancy, health-care, plumbing, access to education, child-mortality, internet-speed. I definitely don’t want to go back to that time. I feel very lucky to live today with all the advantages that this brings. But there is one aspect of the way we worked back then that is pretty great and that still drives most makers of artisanal shaving cream and their peers: the meaning that is inherent in making something yourself for the people that need it. 

When the industrial revolution kicked in, more and more people moved into the cities to ‘get a job’. Before people didn’t “have a job”, they worked. But getting a job seemed attractive: predictable income, little responsibility, etc. The jobs were really hard. Taylorism and scientific management meant that each worker in the factories did the same thing over and over again, like a machine. The goals were efficiency, optimised material flow and predictable output. The less the workers behaved like humans with emotions, ideas, connections between each other and the need to do something meaningful, the better. That’s why outsourcing works best with business processes that are rule and guideline driven and require little personal involvement of those doing them (think shared business services, manufacturing, coding, accounting, etc.). 

It’s those jobs, the jobs that don’t need humanity as a core ingredient that are going to be taken over by robots and computer programs. And of course that sucks for the people that are currently earning a living doing them. 

The question, however, is not, how we can get those jobs back. Those jobs have gone and won’t come back. In fact, these words like ‘gone’ and ‘back’ don’t even make any sense. As soon as a robot is cheaper, faster, more versatile and delivers the same quality as a human, that robot will do the job. Just like cars took over from horse-carriages, planes took over from ships for overseas travel and mobile phones have taken over from landline phones. 

The question worth asking, I think, is rather how we need to structure our economy, how we ensure that everyone can live a dignified life, while doing things that are meaningful to them and their community. How do we create environments where humans can create something meaningful with their unique human competences: empathy, connection, creativity, deep insights and lateral thinking, learning and seeking to understand the world and beyond. 

In my ideal world, no person would need to have a ‘job’ in order to live with dignity. In my ideal world, we’d be free to build, create, learn and discover the things that elevate us and those around us. Inevitable or utopian? Or do I get it all wrong? 

Image Credit: ClaudeAI.uk: https://claudeai.uk/ai-blog/

After two days in a kitchen

A week ago I had the great chance to spend two days in a restaurant kitchen in Germany. The occasion was my mother’s birthday. She had rented the restaurant of my first cooking teacher and now good friend, Martin Herzog, and invited 38 of her closest friends. I had developed a four course menu, each course telling the story of a part of my mother’s past and present. It was a great creative challenge and I loved every minute of it. I was incredibly thankful to Martin, who left me all the creative control and advised and supported me with grace as I took over HIS restaurant. What an act of trust, humility and, well, friendship. 

Here’s a few things I learned along the way: 

1. Hard work isn’t hard when it has purpose. 
The two days I worked in the kitchen, I was standing upright for about 10 hours in a row. No sitting, not even to eat a short lunch snack. Now, for the chefs in the kitchen, this was completely normal. 10 hours, in fact, would be on the low end of a work day. For me it wasn’t normal. Ok, when I run a training, I stand a lot. But on most days, my watch needs to remind me to stand up every once in a while. But as I was standing in the kitchen, it didn’t seem like work to me, it wasn’t even hard. And as I reflect on this, I think it’s because every little thing that we did all day, every movement, every cut, every stir, every discussion had a direct purpose. Each part was going to be put on the plate, contribute to a dish and complete the overall experience. Only unnecessary work is hard. 

2. Being prepared equals being relaxed
When you have to send out 38 dishes in 5 minutes, each plate with 6-7 different components you have to be ready. And not ready when you need to be ready - you have to be ready already hours before. Because after that dish is another dish and after that another dish. I wish I had this degree of foresight and preparation in every training I run. And I’m sure plenty of people wish that their business endeavours would be this well prepared as well. 

3. Taste, taste, taste
The little bucket with clean spoons in it is one of my favourite pieces of professional kitchen equipment. At a hands reach, each cook in the kitchen can reach for a spoon and taste their food. They can check their sauce, adjust the sweetness in the mousse and season the dip. Essentially, there can be no good food without buckets of clean spoons in the kitchen. 
Whoever has heard me talk about feedback knows that this is an example I love to give. I talked about this a few years back at a TEDx Talk. You should watch it here. 

4. Tell a story
A great plate of food is a good thing. It’s tasty, maybe it looks good, hopefully it’s nutritious. A plate of food that tells a story is a whole different thing. Of course it needs to be delicious - without question. But it becomes emotional, memorable and more than just a plate of food if it manages to tell a story. And this is true for almost any product: I love my backpack because it’s really, really well made. But I also love it because I know it was produced in a small factory in Seattle, designed by a man called Tom who’s been designing and making luggage since the 70s. I enjoy typing this on a computer that is a direct descendent from a little machine built by two young men called Woz and Steve. Using it allows me to be part of their story, just as carrying it around in my backpack allows me to be part of Tom's story. 
When I work with clients, I try to understand their story and become a part of it. And I share my story and invite my clients to become part of that and just like that, we both are engaging in more than just a training, workshop or conference. It’s really rewarding. 

Happy ever after

Relationships are hard enough among people. Remaining interested and interesting for each other requires self-consciousness, reflection and evolution. The benefits are obvious: you have a partner that supports, deeply knows and cares about you and that can be there for, gaining a sense of meaning and purpose through that. 
Relationships between service-providers and clients are different, of course. But not completely different. 
How do you remain interesting for a client? How can you evolve together and be companions for each other’s development? How can you move from being a faceless service-provider to a partner. 

The truth is - I don’t really know. 

What I do know is that this is a crucial question. Whether you are independent and roast and sell coffee, provide training, have a design studio or consult in business strategy or you work within a larger organisation and provide internal services like product design, accounting, research or leadership (yes, leadership is a service, of course it is). If you don’t continuously provide a meaningful contribution to your client’s work and life you might ‘split up’ sooner or later. 

In Mechanistic Organisations, we don’t have (or need) this service mentality. Members of different functions don’t deliver services out of an intrinsic desire to meaningfully add value to someone else’s work. They do it because it’s their job description to do so. Management and leadership is most certainly not seen as a service. 

Organic Organisations, on the other hand breathe service. Due to their contextuality and lived inter-dependence it is impossible to not think of your work outside of it’s meaningfulness to others. Many examples that we studied showed team-members being crucially involved in hiring managers and their peers (as their job is to make their work easier and better). Staff functions such as HR, planning or purchasing have to justify towards their peers that they add value to those involved in the output of the company. This leads, by the way, to most of these organisations employing hardly any middle-managers and very few staff functions. 

So the question of how to continuously play a meaningful role for someone else remains. Is it even a reasonable ambition? 
Think of individuals or companies that have been a part of your professional life for a long time. Why do you continue to have a relationship with them? What are commodity products (coffee, toilet paper, tea, etc.) that you buy from a certain provider even though the competition might be just fine as well? What’s that special differentiating factor that let’s you choose one over the other? 

Not rhetorical questions, by the way. I’m really interested, so please leave me some comments. Thanks!

Money, fairness and uncomfortable conversations

When I talk about Organic Organisations, I often get some raised eye-brows when it comes to financial management. Many Organic Organisations, from Semco in Brazil to CTT in Germany, practice radical financial transparency. What this means is that everyone in the company can access and review the finances of the company, including the salaries of every member, the investments, purchases, rental costs, etc. Semco organised in co-operation with the unions courses for assembly line workers on how to read financial documents and balance sheets. 

Talking about money is hard. It’s uncomfortable and stressful. Many people would rather earn less than openly speak about how much they think they should earn. Most are terrified by the idea that their colleagues would know how much they earn. 
Funny, isn’t it? That conversations and knowledge about money are so entangled with feelings of shame and discomfort. 

What is a fair salary? Is it the same amount that a person who does the same job in a different company makes? Is it enough money to support your life plus a little more for saving? Is it the same that everyone else in the company earns? Is it an amount that reflects the difficulty and experience required to do a certain job? 

There is, of course, not one answer, no silver bullet. What IS fair is what FEELS fair by those that are concerned by it. 
CTT, an event company in Germany with 30 members, pays every member of the organisation the same salary, regardless their position. Morning Star, a tomato processing company in the US has a system where every employee suggests what they would like to earn in the coming year, which is being reviewed by a group of employees. The suggestions can be challenged but not denied. Also Semco had a system where every employee could determine their own salary after they filled in a form that helped them in reflecting on their experience, what a similar position would be paid in another company, etc. 

Three different examples that all took a different approach. What they all share, though, is transparency. You are less likely to give yourself an exorbitant salary, if you know that everyone will see how much you give yourself. You are also less likely to think that you are being compensated in an unfair way, if you can see your salary in relation to the profits of the company, the expenses, the expected incomes in the future, etc. 

Conversations about money are uncomfortable as long as they are taboo. Financial transparency inside the company is difficult if there are some clear systemic misbalances that lay bare some of the hypocrisies we all live with. 

My children are 3 and 6. They don’t know how many savings we have, what expenses burden our family and what vacation we can afford and what not. They don’t have to know. They are not mature enough to make meaningful and reasonable decisions about our family finances. My wife knows how much I earn. I know how much she makes. Of course she does, she is my partner. Of course I do, I am her partner. It’s a different relationship. 

So why is it that discussions about money are such a big taboo in so many companies? Is it because the employees are seen as children, for whom it would be a too high burden to deal with that type of knowledge? Apparently, so, no? 

How can you be a partner, an equal, and take reasonable decisions concerning your company, if you don’t have a complete picture about your companies financial situation? You can’t and so you won’t. If you want to truly empower your employees, you may actually have to give them power. Information IS power. Open your books (tenderly). 

Does the where count?

Where are you more productive, at the office or at home? What’s better for morale? Can you build a great team if you never see see each other? Can you get actual work done, if you see each other all the time? 

Yes. No. Both. I don’t care. Wrong question. 

Let me elaborate. Marissa Meyer famously cut down on remote work when she took over at Yahoo. She said that “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” On the other hand, there is strong research that suggests that “a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.” There is truth in both sides. Commuting every day to an office can be as soul-sucking and as productivity-boosting, as working from home (as is beautifully illustrated by one of my favourite cartoonist here). The question is not what’s better, working in an office or working from home. The question is in which circumstances working in an office is the right choice and in which circumstances the home-office is more useful. 

Being at an office is great if

• you need access to specialised equipment that is there;
• you want to discuss or find consensus on important decisions;
• you want to build emotional connections with your colleagues and bond over coffees and little side-chats. 

Working from home is great if

• you need complete control over your environment (noise, who can talk to you when, etc.); 
• you have private things to take care of during the day (accepting a delivery, etc.); 
• you want to limit your commuting time from breakfast table to office to 1 minute. 

What’s really bad for morale and productivity is if someone else decides where you have to work, regardless if that makes sense for what you need to do on that day. Being stuck in traffic is bad enough itself, but being stuck in traffic because you are on your way to an office where the only reason for you to be there is to physically be there and be constantly interrupted in trying to work on something very complicated is a nightmare. Being stuck in traffic on your way to the office, where you have scheduled a meeting with your valued colleagues in order to work on something where you actually all need to sit around the same table for a few hours - that’s completely acceptable, particularly with a phone full of great podcasts that you’ve lined up for this trip. 

In the end it all boils down to agency. Who decides about where and how your spend your time. If you and your colleagues are free and trusted to make those decisions autonomously and based on sense and common needs, you’re probably going to be as happily productive as you can be. 

What's your Why

Any living thing has a purpose. It’s to live. Any organ in your body is continuously working towards one aim and that is to keep you alive. Being alive is a purpose in itself for any amoeba, worm, tree or human.

Through the role that we play in our environment, we also have a second purpose towards that environment. In relation to breathing creatures, a tree’s purpose is to transform carbon into oxygen. In relation to my children, I am a caregiver; in relation to my clients my purpose is to make it easier to learn things that are important for their business success; a bee's purpose towards a field of almond trees is to pollinate them. 

Things that are created by humans to do something for them - machines, mechanisms, etc. only have that second purpose. Their purpose is not to be AND to play a productive role in it’s environment. Machines are only useful as long as they achieve the goals that they were built to achieve. A computer with a broken hard-drive does not compute. A car with a broken engine might still provide shelter, but it won’t drive you anywhere.

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, wrote that “The purpose of business-purpose is to both run better companies, and to run companies better”. 

I think what he is referring to here is the distinction between purpose to the outside and purpose to the inside. It comes to no surprise that a company's focus on the purpose it has in the lives of their community is going to facilitate their success greatly. Any endeavour that is purely focussed on making it’s shareholders a great chunk of money is short-lived. (Although it is depressingly frustrating to see how many companies are out there that do exactly this at great success). This is what, I think, Branson meant when he spoke of ‘run better companies’. Being embedded into your context and aware how you can play a role in serving others is going to make your company a better company. 
“Running companies better” then refers to the purpose towards the inside. If you think of your company as a living organism, keeping it alive and making sure that it IS alive becomes as important to daily operations than anything else. Just like a dead bee isn’t going to pollinate any trees, a company that is ‘dead inside’ isn’t going to become a truly great contributor to it’s environment. 
Companies that are working in the ‘Machine Paradigm’, or Mechanistic Organisations, are built to serve an outside purpose only - may that be the provision of services or the manufacturing of products. 
Companies that are working in the ‘Organism Paradigm’ see themselves as alive, as an ecosystem of human beings that deserve to be seen and treated as humans. In fact, often their explicit purpose is to be alive; to be a great environment for their members to flourish and have an enriching and sustainable space for doing meaningful work. And by ‘being alive’ they can’t help themselves of quite automatically achieve their ‘outside purpose’ as well. Humans have an intrinsic need for their work to have meaning, and what is more meaningful than to know that what you do benefits your community, solves real problems of real people and ultimately is ‘purposeful’. 
I’m pretty confident that this is quite close to what Richard Branson meant when he said “running companies better”. 

The Sniper Conundrum

A friend recently told me about his boss. He said he’s a sniper. “What, he shoots people down?”, I asked. “No, you give him a target and he will hit it whatever what”, my friend replied. His boss is really good at what he does, an achiever, if you will. The trouble is, he is a really bad manager and leader. 
In most traditional organisations, or ‘Mechanistic Organisations’, you award people with status by making them in charge of other people. The more people are ‘under you’, the higher your impact and importance within the company. This is not a new experience. In fact, the Peter Principle from 1969 describes an aspect of this. According to this principle, people get promoted based on their performance in their current role, not based on the potential they have to be successful in a new role. This means that people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence and remain there, doing something they are not actually that good in anymore. It’s a straight path to loneliness; accumulating signs that you matter because it doesn’t feel like it at all anymore in your work. Like running on a treadmill in a bland room and after years of doing that you’re still as unfit as you’ve always been. 

But it doesn’t need to be that way. There are many ways to appreciate good work and award status to people, not just making them in charge of others. A higher salary, freedom, independence, reduced working hours, or the ability to pick the most interesting problem to work on next, to name just a few. 
There is a new form of working on the rise, one that is not mechanistic, prescribed and hierarchical. All over the world we can see small innovators that do business and co-work in new ways. We call them Organic Organisations. These are organisations that are in balance with their context and always evolving. They are internally dynamic, with distributed decision making and shifting forms based on need and environment and purpose. In such organisations achievers (or snipers) add value by doing what they do best and they are appreciated for it. Leaders emerge and recede as necessary and as required by teams for a specific project at a specific time. You don’t need to manage a big group to be feel relevant and important. 
Mechanistic Organisations focus a great deal of their time and energy on the mechanics of their organisations. Office politics, power struggles and incredibly long approval paths are the results. 
Organic Organisations focus on the work, on being of value to their context (their community, their customers and clients, etc.), on actually going somewhere. They organise and re-organise as necessary in balance with their context and the results are remarkable.

Leadership is storytelling

Humans tell stories. Rarely do we tell these stories by sitting down with someone and say: “let me tell you a story my dear friend…”. No, but we express the story that we want to tell about ourselves through the decisions we take, how we behave and what we aspire. We experience our live as stories and we tell stories by how we live our lives.

A great story touches and moves you. They literally move us, because every good story is a journey and it takes us with it.. Great stories give meaning to our lives (i.e. religion), they enable us to identify with the protagonist and thus motivate us to do things we haven’t done (like a great documentary) or they give us metaphors how to navigate the complexities between good and bad, light and darkness, ego and consciousness (i.e. Star Wars, yes, really). 

I would claim that leadership is nothing but storytelling. Great leaders manage to tell multiple stories on multiple layers that are all coherent: the organisation, the individual and the external world. 

Within the macrocosm of the communities we live in, an organisation can be described as a single entity. Leaders who are capable story-tellers manage to see and describe the organisation as the protagonist. They can clearly describe what journey the organisation is on and why this journey is worthwhile. They can paint the picture of the obstacles that are necessary to overcome and how the sacrifice and effort is worthwhile because reaching the destination is not just nice, it’s important and necessary. 

On the individual level within the organisation, great leaders are capable of telling each employee the story of them as the protagonist; how what they do is enabling the organisation to reach the goal. 

Towards the external world, leaders can tell their potential clients and customers the story with THEM as the protagonist and their organisation as the support to reach THEIR goal. You are (or your product is) not Luke Skywalker. Your client is Luke Skywalker. You are the light-sabor that enables Luke to fulfil HIS journey; HIS story. Allegro has just achieved this beautifully in their Christmas Ad. For those who haven't see it: An old man orders over the internet a book to help him learn how to speak English and mostly we observe him do just that. In the end we learn that he went through this difficult journey because he wanted to connect with his small grand-child that grows up in England. Allegro is basically never shown, we only later realise that he ordered the language-learning book on the platform. What a beautiful way to be a light-sabor. 

A common mistake many leaders make is that they think of themselves as the protagonist of the story they tell. Those leaders never spark the intrinsic motivation of their employees and so they have to motivate with money, force and pressure. Leaders, who understand that they are not the protagonist but the guide (think of Dubledor, Gandalf or Obi Wan Kenobi) are capable of leading without force. 

Stories are incredibly powerful and we tell them whether we want to or not. Every leader should ask themselves what story they tell and if it’s the story they want to tell; if it’s the story that they should be telling if they want to reach their goals - not alone but with others. 

The 2016 INCONTRO Christmas Cook

We've heard so many wonderful stories from the participants of last year's Christmas Cook. They told us that it was the best Christmas Party they've ever had. They still remember dishes a year later. They remember the warmth, the fun, the great food that they have cooked together for each other. 

Christmas is all about being together, being warm and having a great time wich each other. We're bringing the the Christmas Cook back this year. Read more about it here and if you're interested, get in touch!

The INCONTRO Christmas Cook-Off

Look outside - is it dark already? If not, it will be soon and each day sooner because winter is coming. Luckily, that means that we will soon have a great excuse to eat lots of sweets, drink warm wine and light a fire in the fire-place. 

You might have heard about the Cook-Off, a team-communication training we here at INCONTRO have developed in the beginning of the year. Some of our participants have loved it so much, they now want to do something similar with their whole team in the pre-christmas time, which is amazing. So we started working of developing this, creating recipes and thinking up creative challenges and soon we’ll start cooking with almost 40 people for a wonderful evening of pre-christmas fun and food. 

If you now think: wow - I want to do this with my team as well! Well, don’t worry. We’re so happy with the things we came up for this, we want to make this available to as many teams, groups, organisations or companies as possible. Have a look at this neat one-pager and get in touch. 

Why I don't write that much

I have a blog on my website. You know that. You’re on it.

But I don’t write very often and sometimes I wonder why that is. There is a lot of value to the written word: it stays, can be revisited, refined and shared easily.

I regularly tell myself that I should really write down a talk I gave and publish it here as an article. But I never do it. I slowly come to realize that this is because I am not a writer. Sounds simple, but for me it’s an important realization. This doesn’t mean that I won’t ever write anything anymore or that I’m going to delete the blog on my website; this website; this blog. I want to keep this channel, but it is not my main channel.

I communicate best by talking, it seems. Which is ironic, because I have a speech impediment. I stutter. I don’t do it, when I’m on stage, or when I run a training or workshop, but my friends know that I sometimes struggle with getting the words out. Nonetheless, when I speak, publicly, I feel that I can communicate more clearly what I think. Kind friends and colleagues tell me that I have a talent for it, and maybe I do. What I know is that even in school and university, I always did better in oral exams than in written ones. Maybe it is that I need to see the person(s) I am communicating with to focus my thoughts. A white sheet of paper, analogue or digitally, has never appeared to me to be very interested in what I have to say, nor give me feedback on if and how it understands me. Communication is a social act for me, bi-directional by nature. That doesn’t mean that I will stop writing. But I will be more forgiving with myself that writing will never feel as natural to me as speaking.

I hope you will pop by here from time to time anyway and read what I wrote, knowing I’m probably not as proud of it as I would be about a talk I gave or a training I facilitated.

And I hope reading my words will be of value to you and worth the time you spent doing so. 

How I prepare a talk

I gave a TEDx talk a few days ago and it will still be a while until I can share the video with everyone. After my talk at TEDx Torun some people asked me about my process of developing a presentation, so as we all wait for the video to be available I thought I might share it here as well.

To prelude, I’ve enjoyed reading the books of Nancy Duarte and Garr Raynolds on this topic and my approach has certainly been influenced by them. I also love Ira Glass’ explanation on how to build a good story, that I’m integrating into my process.

I generally start with trying to think about the one thing I really want people to remember. At TEDx Torun it was: ‘There is an urgent need to get better at feedback’. From there I grab a bunch of Post Its and a marker and I write as many ideas as possible that I think contribute to that thought, illustrate it, deepen it or can be a good example for this. From there, I try to build a structure, a story-board, if you will, that give a good beginning, middle and end point to the presentation and balances theory with examples and anecdotes.

It is only at this point that I start my computer and open Keynote. I ALWAYS use completely blank white slides as a starting point. No pre-defined text boxes, etc.. If I need a text-box, I’ll create a text-box. But I want to make that decision and not leave it up to the template.

Often times I will only use full-screen images that I search for on flickr.com. I limit my search to those images that are available under a creative commons license and download the highest possible resolution of them. When the image appears in my download folder I change its name from all those numbers to be the actual name of the image and the name of the creator. This way it makes it easier to write the credits for the images as the information is always directly there with the image.

But sometimes I also like to use icons and those I find at The Noun Project. It’s an amazing catalogue icons. They are all vector, so you can enlarge them as much as you want without them becoming pixely.

So I do that, I create one slide after the other with a view on my story-board, always thinking “What should people see, whey I say this” and “What image can help me make this point clearer and give it context.”

I also use the presenters notes to write keywords in all-caps to remind me later about the points I want to make.

Then I give the presentation for the first time. To my wife. When the kids are in bed. I attach an old monitor to the laptop, and set it up so that she only sees my slides and I can see the presenters display. And then I give the entire presentation, out loud, to her. She then gives me feedback about what she liked, what was unclear, when she lost track or when an example didn’t make sense to her, when she was engaged, when she laughed, etc. I note all that down and the next day, I change my presentation based on this feedback. And then we repeat that same process and then we repeat it again, until we’re both happy with the result.

This is when the really hard work starts, because now it’s time to give the presentation over and over again. Alone in the office. Under the shower, without the slides. Silently in your head as you sit in the train. Out aloud, as you’re driving somewhere. In the hotelroom, before your presentation. Out aloud with the presenters display and with only seeing the slides, because you never know what the set-up really ends up being at the location where you give your talk. This is really difficult, because speaking aloud by yourself is so awkward.  

I rehearse the presentation as often as I need to until I arrive at the most natural way I can give it in the way that I’m the most satisfied with. And until I can repeat a good run with a good run of the presentation. Then, when giving the actual presentation, I’m so under adrenalin that I still forget to say a few things I wanted to say and it’s always a little bit worse than my best test run during rehearsals, but it’s mostly pretty ok, fluid, smooth and natural and that’s all thanks to the rehearsals.

So that’s how I develop a presentation. Fairly straight forward, I think. But also not the way how most people prepare their presentation. I’d love to hear from you how you prepare a presentation, if you have any tips and tricks that work for you.

 Thanks!

Questions worth asking

When I was in school, I was asked a whole lot of questions. I never really liked that. I didn't like it because the questions where not really about me, or what I think. They were about what other people had thought, written or said. These were testing questions, checking if I remembered what I was told or already know what I'm going to be told. 

When I ran a Training for Trainers recently, I came across such questions again: I had asked some of the participants to prepare short training modules on different topics and run them during the training as a 'training laboratory'. They were, on the one hand, meant to actually teach the group something relevant about Training. But, on the other hand, we also looked at each module later to reflect on what had worked well, and what didn't. One participant started her module the way many training sessions start. She stood at a flip-chart and asked us what we know about the topic at hand. Everybody said something, but I had the feeling that she already knew what she wanted to hear. So I said nothing. 

Later, during the reflection round, I shared, what has become a principle of mine for trainings: 

Never ask a question to which you already know the answer. 

When I know something and I want everyone else to know it, too, I say it. But I also ask many questions during the trainings I run. What do you think about this? What is your experience with this? What is your opinion on this? Can you think of a story that illustrates this? Etc. 

If you ask questions, to which you already know the answer, participants can either be wrong or confirm what you think. Neither way do they create value for themselves or others. 
If you ask questions, to which you don't know the answer, you enter into a dialogue and you and the participants create the knowledge together that everyone can learn from. I prefer that. 

Reframeing Feedback

When I speak with people about Learning in organisations, the conversation regularly shifts quickly to a specific place: the training room. And yes, that's definitely a place where learning takes place. But taking a step back, I would say that this is not where the majority of the learning in an organisation takes place. Most learning happens, on the one hand, when we observe our colleagues - what do they do that is being rewarded, what do they ignore, what focus on, where are they particularly careful? On the other hand, it happens when our colleagues, our bosses or even people that work under us, comment either explicitly or implicitly about what we do. Call it what you want: voicing, commenting, social learning, informal learning or feedback. I like to call it feedback. And it's through feedback that we learn a lot if not almost everything. The problem is - we're not good at giving feedback and we're not good in receiving it. Receiving badly given feedback often times results in defence, or worse, counter-attacks. And more often than not, we don't give feedback to those around us, because we don't want to deal with whatever reaction we might get. There is a lot of potential and it's not being used. Instead of thinking of feedback as a nuisance to be avoided, we need to reframe it as a professional service to our colleagues, a normal thing to give and ask for, a daily routine. Just let that sink in for a moment - I think it would be an big step forward. 

I talked about this at a conference a while back. If you have a moment (well, around 15 mins), I'd love it if you would watch it tell me what you think - do you agree with my thoughts, or am I missing something? 

New Website

A while back, I decided that my website needed a breath of fresh air. I wanted it to look good on mobile phones and tablets as well as on the good old laptop and desktop computer. I also wanted to rethink how I can present myself honestly, clearly to anyone who might be interested in working with me. 

It's been a great exercise to draft the copy for the different sections, to get feedback on them from friends and colleagues and to redraft them and redraft them and redraft them until I was satisfied that they actually say what I do and offer, without hot air, catch phrases, or buzz-words (at least as little as possible of that). 

I also decided to move the platform where the website is hosted and went with Squarespace. I did this, on the one hand, because their interface is really simple and well designed, which helps me with my limited programming knowledge to change things and manage the website on my own, after it's been handed over to me by the designer. On the other hand, I chose them because they appear to sponsor almost every Podcast I listen to. It's my current favorite way to be entertained while walking places, traveling or driving, so I wanted to support those who support those that make something that gives me so much joy. 

The design comes from the capable mind and hands of Pawel Hawrylak of haveasign. He is my go-to person whenever I need professional design work. What can I say: he's really good. You should hire him too. 

The website has been live for a few weeks now, but I wanted to wait to promote it until I have the video of a talk I recently gave, so that, by the time you have read all this, you can also enjoy a little film and who doesn't like a little film? Please let me know what you think about the talk, what I missed, what you liked, etc. And also, please let me know what you think about the new website, ok? I would be most thankful!

Diversity is exhausting, but worth it

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure to speak at an event on Diversity. I was speaking alongside a great panel of speakers. All talks have been recorded and will be uploaded one by one for everyone else to enjoy. Here is the talk I gave, I hope you like it: