I’ve been away:Reflections on a Journey Part 1

Introduction

The blog has been quiet because I have been on the road for 18 days, first to Rome to co-facilitate the second CGIAR/FAO Knowledge Sharing Workshop face to face phase, then on for a quick stop in Prague (cheaper to fly to Israel from Rome via Prague) where I met my pen pal of 40 years face to face for the first time, and finally to my first time in the Middle East in Israel and Palestine.

Four countries, many sets of new and old relationships and a profoundly moving and challenging experience of a new set of complex cultures has left me so much to reflect on that it will take a while. But in the spirit of learning, I wanted to capture some of it here on the blog because it has, for me, profound connections to the work so many of us do around working and communicating across all kinds of lines. And how everything changes, always.

Even as I start typing this at 7 in the morning, I am amazed how it is so dark, for only 18 days ago the sun was up at this time of the morning. How the leaves changed and the last tomatoes gave up any chance of ripening. I was not the only thing changing. Everything changes. As we seek to facilitate change, we are changed.

Interspersed with this reflection will be personal stuff. Political stuff. It is unavoidable when we travel outside our home territories, to become vulnerable and open to new things. So if you read my blog for the more professional stuff, you may either have to skip these posts, or read them with whatever filter you need.

Part 1 – The Power of Doing TOGETHER

I have been doing work with the Consultative Group on International Research (CGIAR) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN for many years. This year, I had the pleasure of doing work for them both at the same time as they collaborated on offering the second iteration of a Knowledge Sharing (KS) workshop some of us developed for the ICT-KM project of the CGIAR earlier this year. The workshop is a three phase online/face to face/online offering focused on learning about choosing and applying knowledge sharing tools and methods in the context of real work. Learn, do, revise, learn, do…. This time we had 35 people from around the world join the workshop with a variety of needs, levels of practice and, as always, time available to participate.

We have learned from similar workshops in the past that the mixing of participants from different organizations has provided some specific benefits. The diversity gets us out of any of our own “organizational ruts.” You know — the things we think we can’t do in our own organizations, the barriers that we feel are always surrounding us. We tend to put those aside when we are with others. The diversity of experience and perspectives opens us up to seeing the work in a new way. What is less-than-useful social “chatter” for one is critical trust building process for another. If we can’t see these things at work in a group, we have a harder time understanding their role in our work. We tend to design knowledge sharing processes based solely on our own perspectives and preferences. When we learn about them in a diverse group, we see them in new ways. This was very present in our online and face to face phases. The diversity does present challenges, but with some persistence and reflection, we can process them as a useful part of the learning. Together.

The F2F workshop was three days of learning about knowledge sharing tools and methods while using them. We spent 1.5 days in Open Space learning about a variety of tools and methods. We used video, audio and graphic recording to debrief our Open Space experience. We broke the ice each day with different methods. We learned together while doing peer assists and Samoan circles. We brainstormed and picked topics with Dotmocracy to Speed Geek about new technologies. It is so hard to really get the essence of these tools and methods simply by reading about them or having them presented. But when you do them, and debrief them afterwards, the learning feels richer and deeper. From the informal participant feedback, this seems to be the case. I’ll be interested to learn more as we do the rest of our post-workshop evaluation.

Debriefing and Crystallizing Learnings

I want to call out specifically the importance of the debrief. After each session which used a knowledge sharing tool or method, we took time to debrief both the experience of the method, how it was facilitated and why it was chosen, leading to a brief discussion of when something may or may NOT be useful. We tried to capture all these debriefs in our wiki notes and blogs, and I hope over the course of the next few weeks, we can weave what we learned in the debriefs into the specific tool and method pages on our shared webbased resource, the KSToolkit. Recently there has been a very rich thread on the KM4Dev (development) email list about capturing lessons learned from F2F events. If you are interested in this topic, take a peek. Look for the posts entitled “Documentation: More than Just Minutes.”

My Key Learnings

  • People make meaning through the construction of their own experience so having a chance to try methods like Speed Geeking and Open Space are important moments, even when we have other constraints which might suggest other methods.
  • Give people ownership of their participation. At the start of the workshop I commented that many people had laptops open. I said I was not going to tell people to close or open them, but that they should make choices about their use of their laptops based both on their own needs and their perception of how their choices might impact others. In other words, we are responsible both for our own actions and to be attentive to the needs and actions of the group. This is right in line with Open Space’s “Law of Two Feet.” At the end of the workshop, a couple of people commented on how important this was for them, and how different from the “usual” where we are told what to do and how to do it.
  • As I noted above, the power of debriefing and shared meaning making.
  • Try to have your workshop close to lodgings. It took a lot of energy to get us from our hotels in Rome out 30 minutes to our meeting location. The location and hosting of our workshop by Bioversity was fantastic, but the travel took a lot of energy that could be used elsewhere. You do what you have to do, but just in case you CAN be close, be CLOSE!
  • I’d like to do more participant “capturing of learning” with video, audio and other media. We did this a bit and I think there is a lot more that I’d like to experiment with.
  • We missed time for people to plan their next steps in their work. Last time we spent too much time on this. This time I think we spent too little.
  • Plan a dinner the night before to start the socializing.
  • When doing Speed Geeking, we did NOT have expert practitioners for each station and in retrospect, that would have been a good idea. I loved that people created useful groups around things they wanted to learn, but I think this mixed up too many things and Speed Geeking might be best with just one intent.
  • Find ways to engage the participants in the facilitation. We did this a bit and I’d like to find more ways to increase others’ chances to facilitate.

Amazing Participants and Co-Facilitators

The joy of work like this is the people I get to work with. The participants of the workshop were diverse, engaged and they didn’t just passively take in information, they engaged and challenged us. And as always, facilitation and learning is not a solo sport, and I want to thank Pete Shelton and Gauri Salokhe, my F2F co-conspiritors, and Simone Stagier who supported from afar.

Soundtrack while writing: the guitar playing of Sungha Jung

Getting used to online interfaces

We are into our second week of the FAO/CGIAR Knowledge Sharing workshop (the first, online phase of 4+ weeks) and I was struck by a conversation in one of our mentors learning logs (we each have a space for journaling.) Alexandra (who logs in as Maria Jorge) has come back after taking the first version of this workshop earlier this year to be a mentor. Joined in this conversation copied (with permission) below, is Michael, another past participant returning as a mentor, and Gauri, who moved from past participant to co-facilitator!

Maria Jorge – Friday, 5 September 2008, 03:57 AM

Hi all,

I think this second time (I participated already in the first KS) I am more excited about interacting with people and benefit from their experiences… I also want to browse through the moodle and learn a few extra tools. I hope to have time over the weekend to explore this more.

I like the new look of the moodle! The idea of having the list of facilitators and participants timezone and city all together is great, it gives a sense of group, of ‘room’ where everybody is together. Thanks for the improvement!

Great to see so much enthusiasm and interaction already!

Nancy White – Friday, 5 September 2008, 03:55 PM
I’m giggling, Alexandra, because I don’t think we changed much at all in the moodle. In fact we exported everything from the old workshop, reinstalled it here, then just pulled out the old discussions!! What seems different?

Michael Riggs – Sunday, 7 September 2008, 09:41 PM
Alexandra, I felt the same way! I liked the “new and improved” Moodle site for KS2 when I first logged in last week. It seems much easier to get around. So much so I went back to the KS1 site to see what had changed … and realized, as Nancy says, not much! I guess the site became more familiar through the process of KS1 than I had realized, and now navigating around seems quite straightforward. Chalk one up to experience.

Maria Jorge – Monday, 8 September 2008, 02:19 AM
Hi Michael,
Thanks for sharing your impressions too, so I do not feel so weird… I guess we learn more than we realized and some issues become ‘naturally’ familiar without us noticing. I think that the idea of a week zero (i.e. extra time to browse around without much extra commitment) was good (I don’t remember this in the first KS but perhaps there was that too and I do not remember…? I started a bit late so perhaps is that what I missed then?
Regards
Alexandra

Nancy White – Monday, 8 September 2008, 10:58 AM
I would love to “quote” this conversation on my blog if you two would be comfortable. It is a PERFECT example of what changes when we get used to a tool and it starts to disappear into the background.

Alexandra, you are right, “week 0” is new. Remember that first call in the first workshop where we tried to both cover the technology and begin substantive conversations? It was a MESS!!!

Gauri Salokhe – Monday, 8 September 2008, 12:22 PM
I can only second what you both have observed. The second time around it does seem easier to use and navigate. In terms of main page (central part) there is one difference – we have tried to put all the weeks’ main activities right at the top. In week 1, we only have week 1 related information and week 0 information is removed and placed elsewhere. In my case, this helps me navigate the space better.

What I also observed is that as a participant, the constant flow of emails seemed overwhelming but as a facilitator I am excited that there is so much happening, especially happy to see that there is so much interaction between participants and everyone trying to help each other.

Maria Jorge

Nancy, you can use our conversation for your blog. No problem!

Michael Riggs – Tuesday, 9 September 2008, 01:41 AM
That is OK with me Nancy.

Two things surface for me here.

  1. Use over time should make things easier. As we master a new interface (no matter how difficult or simple) it should fade into the background so we focus on interaction and content. Design has a lot to do with how fast this happens, as does frequency of use and individual preferences.
  2. Our role impacts are experience of the platform or tool. Obviously when we design something, we have deep familiarity. But when we have a specific role, we approach the platform with different eyes. Facilitator, mentor, participant, designer. So not only does this harken back to my old saw “designed for a group, experienced by an individual,” but it suggests that we may adapt faster if we have a specific role to play.

What do you think?

Edit on Wednesday – Gauri shared some of her reflections on her blog. And I continue to ponder this not only from a “workshop” perspective, but from an ongoing communities of practice perspective.

From Addis Ababa to Las Vegas (catching up on trip reports!)

I started drafting this post on May 12th and here it is the 10th of July. But as you can see, this week is my “catch up on my bloggin” week. So be warned! What follows is my very  brief “catch up and report” on my Ethiopia trip. I’ll do a separate post on the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas that happened as the second leg of the trip.  You will notice that the text reads as  if it was written in May. Much of it was. Grin.

After a great week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I’m back in the USA (after 28 hours of travel!!) and in Las Vegas at Community 2.0 Conference . Talk about culture shock. From the streets of Addis, where the smell of Ethiopian coffee floats out across streets filled with people who are alternately desperately poor and begging, or part of the emerging middle class, to the surreal neon and hype of Las Vegas, my head is totally confused. Here is the Ethiopia part of the story.

The week in Addis was wonderful. I was there to co facilitate a face to face follow up workshop on Knowledges Sharing for the CGIAR. This came after a four week online workshop. Simone Stagier blogged a lot of the workshop sessions here.  Lots of pictures here.

I arrived on Saturday night on the same flight as one of our workshop participants, Pete Shelton. We had a brief stopover in Khartoum – wow, a dessert town in every sense of the word. Photos here. Then on to Addis. After a long wait for visa and passport control, we headed to the ILRI campus, our home for the next week. Ah, sleep.

Sunday Pete and I  went into town to the National Museum, the home of “Lucy” the oldest known human skeleton. We followed up with our first Ethiopian food (I now love Injera – in Ethiopia it has a tangier, sour-dough taste. I understand in US restaurants not everyone uses the teff grain) which was a great way to start the trip.

On Monday I met up with my co-facilitators, Simone Stagier and Petr Kosina  to do our prep. We decided to check and find out who had arrived and we had a little surprise. Three of our participants had also come in early and since they had to leave early, we created an impromptu session Monday afternoon. It is always good to remain flexible.

On Tuesday the workshop officially kicked off with a World Cafe, capturing the highlights of what we learned in the first online phase (4 weeks). In the room were 21 people passionate about knowledge sharing in international agricultural research. From Africa, Europe, Asia and the US, we spent the next three days working, eating, learning and playing together. As I always find, going from online to F2F totally jump starts both the personal interactions and the work. Plus being able to stay and meet on the campus created a great container for social interaction – for me a key to learning.

We covered a lot of territory on knowledge sharing tools and methods and each person worked to plan a knowledge sharing project at their home institution. As each person did and shared a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) on their projects, it was interesting to see that the most shared challenges were technical (connectivity in many of the countries where people are doing their work) and social (getting engagement in KS, especially in a research based culture that rewards formal publishing). It was a perfect reminder that we need to pay attention to both areas and that neither the implementation of a new tool, or the presentation of an opportunity easily triggers knowledge sharing.

Despite little connectivity during the workshop, we tried to share our collective learnings about tools. At the end of the workshop on the “still want to learn” list of many was “more tools.” We were told in advance that people in the networks we were targeting were not so interested in tools, but clearly this group was. We also used a variety of knowledge sharing methods and spent a lot of time talking about the social processes of tools, so I think we did a pretty good job keeping a “holistic” view of knowledge sharing.

Nancy and NadiaOn Saturday one of our local hosts, Nadia and her husband David took three of us out into town – a little sightseeing, coffee sipping and of course, some shopping. Thank goodness there are no ATMS and no credit cards, or I would have gotten carried away with beautiful jewelry, fabrics and lots of very cool rural farming artifacts (grain baskets, dairy gourds, etc). As it was, I was happy to contribute to the local economy.

As I left Addis that Saturday night, I was again reminded of the power of travel to open our eyes to new experiences and to help us see more clearly our own identity. Ethiopia is the fourth country in Africa I have visited, and a reminder of the diversity of the continent, something we American’s often lump together as “Africa.” From the high mountain geography, to the distinct Ethiopian culture, to the impact of colonialism from Italy and the Soviet Union, to the unique taste of the teff-based Injera.

Then there was Las Vegas. Mamma mia…

Knowledge Sharing Toolkit – your feedback?

kstoolkitAre you interested in knowledge sharing tools and methods? Particularly if you work in non profits, NGOs or in international development? If so, I’d appreciate it if you took a look at a project some of us are putting together, The Knowledge Sharing Toolkit. From the draft “about” information:

This toolkit is a living knowledge repository about knowledge sharing. We created it to be a resource both for KS workshops and as an ongoing place to learn about, improve upon and generally share our knowledge sharing practices. There are other KS toolkits out in the world – many of them listed in our acknowledgments. Most of them, however, are static – not updated. We wanted to provide a place where we can share our practices in an on-going manner. So we invite you to improve upon any of the entries, leave your name and contact information if you can be a resource on a tool or method, and share stories (both success and “uh-oh – failure” types) of these methods and tools in use. Let’s help each other.

Edit in the wiki, comment in the wiki discussion tabs or leave your comments here. Thanks in advance!

Creative Commons License photo credit: Choconancy1