I’m not a big fan of “training” — it feels like something we do “unto” others. But something from this Fast Company article on training at Google caught my eye. I’ve highlighted the bit…
Once a quarter, the company tosses a larger training at the staff, called SalesPro, which takes a deep dive into one particular strategic issue, like display advertising or the mobile business. The soup-to-nuts program takes about six hours, but rather than delivering it all in one fell swoop, or even through a series of hour-long, do-it-yourself modules, Google breaks the information into bite-sized chunks lasting no more than seven minutes each, so agents can download and peruse them at their desks, on their commutes, even on their cell phones while watching Little League or waiting in line at airport security.Online games help agents dial in their knowledge. Leaderboards foster friendly competition. And quizzes following each training make sure the agents are absorbing the new information.“This is a new, complicated, and very fast-moving market,” Dennis Woodside, who took over as President, Americas, in 2009 when Tim Armstrong jumped ship to become CEO of AOL, tells Fast Company. “The challenge is: How do you get a comprehensive overview in a short period of time?”Google’s new tack is a far cry from the traditional methods of corporate training, that of corralling staffers into classrooms or having them click through tedious online modules.
I’ve been doing a lot of online events and I’ve been trying to break things down more or less in seven minute segments to try and alternate information delivery with more intentional group interaction (shared whiteboarding, polls, chat, etc) If nothing else, it is a good reminder for me to shut up for a bit! It seems to help quite a bit in my experience.
Now here is another interesting segment on the Google efforts that resonates
“People learn best from experts,” Newhouse says, “but they learn best from experts who are not droning on and on.” The secret to the Product Spotlights, she says, is that rather than relying on product managers to dream up a course, the moderator simply guides them to the aspects of the product most relevant to the sales staff. Woodside says the new training method probably costs about the same as the old approach. Its more investment, he says, than cost.
I’d replace the word “expert” with “practitioners.” And really work hard to help those practitioners know/see/feel/hear how important their knowledge is to others. One of the things that always amazes me is how often people think what they know isn’t valuable to others. Most often it is. (Funny, there are also a few who think they are the center of the universe. And they probably aren’t!)
A conversation emerging in the Network Weaving Community of Practice (NWWCoP) focuses on this question: how can/do we use social media for intentionally weaving our networks? As we prepare for a synchronous conversation today, I realized I can frame this question from a technology stewardship perspective, specifically the idea of curating our own personal technology configurations so that they can help us tap into and amplify the value of our networks.
What is a Technology Configuration?
From Digital Habitat’s we framed the idea of configuration this way: “By configuration we mean the overall set of technologies that serve as a substrate for acommunity’s habitat at a given point in time—whether tools belong to a single platform,to multiple platforms, or are free-standing.”
For a while I was obsessed with tagging material that helped us see others’ configuration, via my Delicious tags. Each configuration teaches me something new and gives me a new perspective on my own and the configurations of my communities. (See also other posts on the Digital Habitats blog on configuration.) In some ways, these felt like a type of fingerprint. While many communities used similar tools, the individual variations were fascinating. This made sense to explore at the community level, especially with more bounded communities.
While community’s have their configurations, so do individuals. When working with networks, where we are tapping into the value of connections between people, it becomes the intersection of individual configurations that fascinate me for many reasons. Here are a few:
How do individual’s configurations intersect and complement or compete with their community’s configuration.
How does the intersection between and individual’s configuration and their community’s make the individual’s networks available to their community? Specifically, what are the individual-to-individual configuration implications?
How do we use our individual configurations for network weaving itself? (For example, see http://oneforty.com/i/toolkits)
Let’s get a bit more concrete about #3. Clearly a lot of non profits are interested in social media generally, but lets focus on network weaving for a moment.For example, some of my key network weaving practices include “closing triangles” (introducing and helping people connect), sharing information from smaller, closed groups out to the larger world/networks, and curating resources within and across networks. What configurations might I use for these?
Closing Triangles – email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, Facebook – all to do introductions and to “begin the conversations” while linking to relevant bios and backgrounds. The emphasis is on the social interaction and visibility of individual identity.
Sharing Information – blogs, Twitter (and related tools), delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube (and all content sharing sites) – the focus is on publication in some form or another, then connecting people to that content.
Curating Resources – mostly the same as sharing information, but with the added layer of tags, rating mechanisms, aggregation tools.
Managing Our Configurations
A major challenge we run up against in this proliferation both of practices and tools is how to manage this. There is a lot of talk these days of dashboards and tools like Social Base. I have resisted digging too deeply there due to my own habit of “rabbit holing” and not getting my work done, but clearly this is on my radar screen. What I’ve seen so far has been more about tracking metrics of social media rather than tying the media to the practice and desired outcomes.
Any guidance for me? What is your practice of managing your technology configuration from a particular practices perspective, such as network weaving?
As readers know from my last post, our family has been celebrating the life of and grieving the loss of my dad, Bill Wright. Yesterday was his memorial mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church here in Seattle where mom and dad found their Seattle “church home.” Right now I have the house to myself and found I needed some reflective time, and some processing of what has been swirling around us: community.
The core of my professional practice is “connected and connecting” people. In any sense of those words. Experiencing the love and community around my family and me since Dad entered the hospital on March 22nd is a fertile ground for noticing and reflecting on those things that tell us community is present, “community indicators.” If I think to the earthquakes in Christchurch, NZ, and Japan, these community indicators are alive and activated. They are alive in my home town.
By chance I happened on a TedTalk by Eric Whitacre today and lo and behold, the soundtrack for my reflection showed up. I received my love of music from my dad. I remember him playing me albums of marching band music, musicals, folk and classical music into my preteen years. Mom and Dad took us to hear Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops when they played at San Francisco’s Stern Grove. Over the last week I curated some music for the funeral reception – lots of folk music, especially banjo. But all with “soul.” So for me, a soundtrack feels “right.” Even more, the soundtrack itself is a community indicator, a virtual choir of hundreds of voices, recorded around the world and brought together. Now this is not about artifice, or a diminishing of the extraordinary power of singing together, but of how we can sing together in many ways. Singing together IS a community indicator. Take a listen.
So back to this community thing. I want to thank and honor the many communities that have gathered us in their arms over the last two weeks. I was preparing for a three week set of workshops in New Zealand and Australia the week my dad fell into a coma. A few emails and all of my colleagues who have worked hard to set up the workshops, market, book venues and everything replied to my notice that I had to cancel with two things. “Yes, no problem” and “our hearts, prayers and thoughts are with you and your family.” They lifted that off my shoulders like a warm spring breeze. The participants, some of whom booked plane tickets to come to the workshops handled it all with grace and love.
Washington DC trip (1969?)
Here in Seattle, from the moment the 911 team arrived to my Mom’s emergency call, to the last few hours in the hospital when Dad was leaving us, people reached out. Strangers. Ambulance drivers. Emergency room nurses. Doctors, techs, cleaning folks, everyone. I think they all knew what was happening before we did, so they gently made the path a little clearer, a little more peaceful as we walked along it.
My parent’s pastor, Father John, came to the emergency room and hospital. On the night of Dad’s death, also his birthday, he called his sister with whom he was to have dinner and said he had to be elsewhere and he came to the hospital. My sister was there and she and I were able to sing to Dad through the end. She sings with a Threshold Choir in Davis, California and brought that calm peace. I would not have been able to sing alone. The nursing staff brought in food for the family as we watched and waited through the last hours. One saw my son was really struggling and hugged him and offered words of comfort.
Across town at Mirabella, the next day, as my mom walked down the hall, people started the flow of hugs, tears and “we are here for you” that have continued unabated. Flowers, cards, food. Yesterday at the funeral, 78 Mirabellians had signed up to share two buses and many carpools and came to celebrate Dad’s life. And many promised to keep reaching out to Mom as she works her way through the stages and waves of mourning and loss.
Dad and Randy, Santa Clara
Father John create a beautiful service that, with family members and friends doing readings and remembrances, flowed like a practiced choir. He started his homily with a verse from a favorite song of Dad’s “All God’s Critters Have a Place in the Choir” (by Bill Staines) and connected it to the Beatitudes which he read for the gospel, and to Dad’s generous spirit. MHB Conant sang and Robert McCaffery-Lent brought solace and beauty through music. (See 2011 Bill Wright Program).
Family members did the readings and Jack Blume (a Mirabella resident), Randy Wright (my brother) and Cleve Wright (a friend of my Dad’s and a former Mirabella employee) shared amazing, warm and beautiful stories about Dad. To a one, they all talked about Dad’s openness, positivity and generosity of spirit. Tears, laughter, music. As it should be.
Afterwards at the reception in the Parish hall there were more stories, songs (the water aerobic’s “Zippidy Doo Dah”), red wine (as Dad would want it) and lots of people coming up to me to say “your Dad was remarkable,” or “I don’t usually go to funerals, but I came to your Dad’s and I’m glad I did.” I think Father John also converted a few people to his parish!
Dad and I on the Washington Coast
Back online on Twitter, Facebook and on my blog condolences flowed in. I heard from people in my Dad’s life that I hadn’t heard from in years. Family that I thought didn’t even know I blogged commented here (thank you!) Cards from clients. Tons of love. This sustains us as we ride the waves of loss and grief. They refresh precious memories, sharpen stories that may have been fading.
My Dad was a steady light in my life. Patient to a fault. Tenderhearted. Appreciative. Easy to be with. He fixed things and showed me HOW to fix things. He gave me my curly hair, my love of music and vegetable gardening, my inclination to wave at trains, and a confidence to step out in the world even when I felt scared and shy. Up to the last he was engineering and reengineering, having recently re-jiggered a no-knead bread recipe to fit into the new cast iron pan he got at the family Christmas gift exchange. His Sudoku prowess blew my mind. Both he and my mom role modeled community service at every turn, in often different but significant ways.
I can’t imagine doing this alone. You are my community. Your “indicators” are blinking and lighting up like the milky way on a clear, mountain night. Thank you.
2 cups (14 oz/40g) firmly packed golden brown sugar
3/4 cu (3 oz/90g) dried cranberries
1/2 cup (4fl oz/125 mil) orange juice
1/2 cup (2 1/2 oz/75g) minced shallot (I’ve also used red onion)
3 tablespoons minced, peeled fresh ginger
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon finely grated orange zest
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (I’ve also improvised with other yummy spices like star anise)
3/8 teaspoon read pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 lob (500 g) pears, peeled, cored and cut into 1/2 inch dice
4 cups (1 lb/500g) fresh or frozen cranberries
In a heavy non aluminm saucepan over medium heat, combine the brown sugar, dried cranberries, orange juice, shallot, ginger, vinegar, orange juice, shallot, ginger, vinegar, orange zest, cinnamon, red pepper flakes and salt. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Add the pears and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the pears are tender, about 10 minutes.
Increase the heat to medium high. Add the fresh or frozen cranberries and boil, stirring frequently, until they begin to burst, about 5 minutes.
(the rest is canning directions — you don’t need that do you? I freeze whatever isn’t scarfed up. Much easier!)
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Per many Twitter requests…. Happy Thanksgiving (US holiday, but spirit is universal).
