Trainer-teacher-learners worldwide are on the cusp of a magnificent collaborative opportunity: participation in Open Education Week, which runs from Monday – Friday, March 11-15, 2013. Ostensibly for those involved in formal academic education programs, this is an opportunity that should appeal to anyone involved in the numerous entities comprising our global learning environment: K-12 schools; colleges, universities, and trade schools; libraries; museums; workplace learning and performance (staff training) programs; professional associations and organizations like the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), the American Library Association, and the New Media Consortium ; and many others. It’s a chance for us to collectively examine the roles we can play together to tackle the wicked problem of reinventing education and developing ways to effectively support lifelong learning in a world where we can’t afford to ever stop learning.
For those of us wanting to continue our explorations within the context of the Wikinomics model, we turn to another variation on the open theme: the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) talk—“Four Principles for the Open World”—that Tapscott delivered in 2012. He takes us a bit deeper into the open movement by suggesting that there are four pillars of openness: collaboration, transparency, sharing, and empowerment: “The open world is bringing empowerment and freedom,” he tells us at one point.
We aren’t, at this point, anywhere near achieving that goal. But Tapscott, by introducing us to the concept of murmuration near the end of his TED talk through a video showing an exquisitely beautiful murmuration of starlings, provides an example from nature that should inspire all of us to start by participating and collaborating in Open Education Week (conversations on Twitter will be organized though use of the #OpenEducationWk hashtag and nurtured through the @OpenEducationWk Twitter account) and then incorporating open practices into our training-teaching-learning endeavors wherever we can.
N.B.: This is the nineteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.
Completely immersed in #etmooc (the Educational Technology and Mediamassive open online course) with more than 1,600 other learners from several different countries since early February, I have just received a lovely reminder that we make a mistake by not paying attention to what is happening in our own learning backyards.
Using courses purchased from Cengage Learning’sEd2Go, San Francisco Public is making these courses available at no cost beyond what we already pay in the tax revenues that support library services. The list of subject areas covered is magnificent: accounting and finance; business; college readiness; computer applications; design and composition; health care and medical; language and arts; law and legal; personal development; teaching and education; technology; and writing and publishing.
The initial list of courses is spectacular, as even the most cursory review reveals. Following the teaching and education link, for example, produces several subcategories of courses: classroom computing; languages; mathematics; reading and writing; science; test prep; and tools for teachers. Following that classroom computing subcategory currently produces links to 13 different offerings, including “Teaching Smarter with Smart Boards,” “Blogging and Podcasting for Beginners,” “Integrating Technology in the Classroom,” and “Creating a Classroom Website.”
SFPL’s Ed2Go offerings under the personal development link are organized into 10 subcategories including arts; children, parents, and family; digital photography; health and wellness; job search; languages; personal enrichment; personal finance and investments; start your own business; and test prep.
The offerings appear to be wonderfully learner-centric in that each course listing includes a “detail” page that provides learners with a concise description of the learning need to be met by the course; a formal course syllabus; an instructor bio; a list of requirements so learners know in advance what they need to bring to the course; and student reviews offering comments by previous learners.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Ed2Go roll-out is how it reflects SFPL’s growth as a learning organization that uses learning to serve its community; when I last spoke with colleagues a couple of years ago about their plans to offer online learning to library users, the plan was still in its early-development stages. Discussions, at that point, were centered on short staff-produced videos using Camtasia or other online authoring tools. Members of the library’s Literacy and Learning Area Focus Team have clearly made tremendous progress since that time in finding ways to offer learning opportunities to library users, and they are far from finished.
“We’re rolling it out slowly,” a colleague told me this afternoon. “Training is one of our big pushes right now. It [Ed2Go] is our first start, and we have other ideas down the pike…We’re serious about internal [staff] training, external [non-staff] training—going out to the public.”
The idea of having staff produce videos is still under consideration, as is the idea of having library staff take an even more active role in providing more learning opportunities for the public: “We’re talking about doing out own trainings and putting them online, but that’s down the road. We’re not reinventing the wheel—but we are rounding it.”
While it was far from perfect, it proved to be a spectacular learning experience for those who wanted the opportunity to create another learning sandbox in a course that has promoted experimentation as a way of becoming comfortable with a few of the numerous social media tools available to us.
The experiment—not originally built into the course, but completely in character with the approach we’ve been taking together—was inspired during our second Facebook office hour last week. We had begun discussing how different people were using Google+ Hangouts creatively, and I responded to a question by describing how Samantha Adams Becker (from the New Media Consortium) and I had used Hangouts as the vehicle for blendedcross-countrypresentations on technology in learning. (I was onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area with American Society for Training & Development—ASTD–colleagues, and Samantha came in from her home in New Orleans via the Hangouts.) I also led the virtual office hour participants to the YouTube video of John Butterill’sVirtual Photo Walks via Google+ Hangouts. It was at that moment that one of the participants expressed an interest in conducting our next virtual office hour via a Hangout, and the request picked up momentum through the learners’ own actions.
When I saw that one of the course participants was running with the idea of connecting with a few other learners via a Hangout—an option suggested as a final course activity—I contacted her to ask whether she would like to combine that effort with the proposed office hour and actually facilitate the session herself. She immediately accepted, sent out the invitations both on Google+ and in the class forum (in Moodle), and began preparing for the session. Although I was there to support her during the brief planning stages and while the Hangout was in progress, it really was a learner-driven session with all the ups and downs we expected through that effort.
She and I worked together in advance to craft a rough outline of how the session would proceed, and agreed that part of the success would come from not overly structuring the conversation. She and others exchanged information ahead of time via Google+ and the class forum. She even set up a pre-session sandbox for anyone who wanted to play with the technology before the office hour officially began.
When we logged on at the appointed time, she and the others were fantastic in addressing challenges. The initial Hangout was a bit slow, and screens froze a couple of times, so we decided that she should log out and then come right back in to see if the connection would stabilize. Although the rest of us were able to continue in that original Hangout, she somehow found herself locked out of it, so immediately contacted me, via a separate chat, to see if the entire group could move into a new Hangout. The transition was relatively quick, and we were all in the new, much more successful Hangout, within 10 minutes of the original start time—a great learning experience for those interested in seeing how easy it could be to resolve problems within a new learning environment like a Google+ Hangout.
As was the case with our initial Facebook virtual office hour, we spent another few minutes playing around with the technical side of the event since this was meant to be a learning experience, not a professionally-produced program: helping participants unmute their microphones, establishing an understanding of how to effectively use the chat function, and even finding a way to allow one struggling participant to view the session through a live feed via YouTube. By the time we were a quarter of the way through our hour-long session, we had moved away from discussions of how to operate within a Hangout and were already discussing topics germane to the work we were doing in “Social Media Basics.”
None of us expects to win any awards for production values or content from that first experiment, but we all walked away with something far more important: the memory of an engaging online session that made everyone feel as if we had finally “met” in the course because we had that virtual face-to-face experience, and lots of ideas about how the experience could quickly be replicated in our own workspaces to the benefit of those we serve.
And if that isn’t at the heart of successful learning in our onsite-online world, then I’m not quite sure what is.
And yet we don’t have to go very far to see that workplace learning and performance (staff training) efforts still are seen by many managers and employees as something that we have to do when we really should be doing our jobs—a diversion away from work.
It’s not difficult to understand how we’ve reached this point. Many of us feel as if the pace of work continually increases with little compensation, so we find ourselves trying to do more with less and less discretionary time while recognizing that something has to give. And let’s be honest: there are plenty of staff training offerings that are more deadly dull than the list of ingredients on the side of a bag of potato chips—workshops or webinars offered to meet a legal or company mandate, or thrown together at the end of a budget year so we’re not left with unexpended funds in an organizational training budget. We and our learners are tired of being forced to look at PowerPoint presentations with cheap clip art and far too much (unreadable) text, delivered by instructors who are trying to cram too much content into too short a period of time—whether it’s face to face or delivered via an online asynchronous course which, by the way, keeps crashing because there’s a disconnect between the technology used by the instructor and the technology used by the learner.
On the other extreme of our learning landscape, we have first-rate learner-centric offerings that creatively meet our organizations’ and our own learning needs—yet we almost feel guilty for taking advantage of those opportunities because it means we leave our colleagues short-handed while we’re away from our worksite.
That, I believe, is the small but essential bit of unfinished business we need to address, and the beginning of a new year gives us an admittedly artificial opportunity to take a new look at this long-standing workplace challenge. Each of us—from highest level executive to least-motivated member of our organizations—needs to work toward seeing training-learning as an integral part of all we do rather than continuing to support the myth that learning is a diversion, something apart from work that needs to be quickly completed and checked off a to-do list so we can literally get back to work.
If learning becomes a recognized and cherished part of work, we’re taking a significant step toward developing first-rate communities of learning all around us. This, in turn, provides more motivation to make each of those learning opportunities as professionally polished as the products and services provided by the best organizations we can find. It also makes us better, more deft, at serving those who rely on us.
We’re not going to change the face of learning in a single year; transformational success stories along the lines of those told in Pasi Sahlberg’sFinnish Lessons take a commitment to decades of changing attitudes and procedures. But if we do begin by fostering a greater appreciation for the magnificent results that engaging training-teaching-learning offers, and recognize that work and learning are completely intertwined rather than somehow in opposition to each other, we may be closer to completing another piece of unfinished business.
Our efforts as members and as the driving force behind the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), when we are at our best, serve as an easy-to-replicate example that seems to be pulled from the pages of McKnight and Block’s Abundant Community book on the topic.
When the writers tell us that “a competent community has three properties” (they focus on the gifts of its members, they nurture associational life, and they offer hospitality through the act of welcoming strangers into their group), we immediately can picture any ASTD or any other well-organized and well-developed association that creates a potent, supportive, and dynamic community through individual chapters, informal regional consortia, and national connections firmly rooted in commonly-adopted mission, vision, and value statements.
This, for anyone engaged in a well-functioning association, is the best of all possible reminders of how abundant our communities are and can be in an onsite-online world. When we’re together—together in every sense of the word—our limitations and challenges somehow take a back seat to the benefits we reap from associating in these abundant communities: full of inspiration; full of colleagues dedicated, as ASTD suggests, to making a world that works better; and full of solutions to problems none of us would dream of tackling without the support of other members of those explicitly abundant communities.
And just as McKnight and Block consistently focus on an abundant community’s ability to awaken the power of family and neighborhoods, members of ASTD and other first-rate associations use their strengths and resources to contribute positively and significantly to the extended communities to which they belong and which they serve. California ASTD chapters, for example, are among those informally providing free learning opportunities to returning veterans under the aegis of programs that support Wounded Warriors; having documented initial successes from this sharing of what they bring to their communities, some of the California chapter leaders are beginning to explore ways to create a more formal consortium to expand what they had previously been doing completely at a local level independent of colleagues from other chapters—a great sign that this particular abundant community is pooling resources in a way that creates greater possibilities while also drawing more attention to ASTD, its chapters, and its individual members as potential community partners reaching beyond more local borders.
None of this, however, matters much if our community doesn’t carry through on its commitment to be as permeable as possible. When we are greeted, welcomed, and drawn into conversation the moment we walk into an ASTD gathering, we sense the draw and engagement of an abundant community: it makes us want to join the club. This doesn’t mean that every person entering our community will ultimately want to serve on a board of directors or become a major financial supporter of the organization’s activities, but what makes us strong is our willingness to accept all interested parties at whatever level is comfortable to them: occasional visitor, member of a local chapter, dual member of the local and national organization, member of a local chapter board, member of a national committee of volunteers dedicated to strengthening and promoting the organization throughout its extended community, and former board member who remains engaged at any sort of level that contributes to the continuity of the association.
And that, I would suggest, is the key element and resource that contributes to the success of an abundant community—one capable of holding our attention and setting up the continuity that creates something capable of outlasting the efforts and lifetime of any individual member.
A heartfelt and encouraging paean to the power of collaboration, The Abundant Community serves as a positive source of inspiration for rethinking many of our unquestioned assumptions; it also consistently serves as a useful handbook for those of us interested in and committed to building the sort of collaborative coalitions that make a difference locally, regionally, nationally, and globally with surprisingly little effort.
McKnight and Block begin the rethinking process by drawing a distinction between what they call “citizen” and “consumer” societies—maintaining that until we reverse the trend away from the citizen to the consumer model, we’re going to miss the obvious abundance of resources around us and the opportunities to overcome the challenges that leave so many people feeling incapable of effecting change.
Consumer society, they maintain, is predicated upon the belief that “satisfaction can be purchased”; the result, they consistently suggest, is that we try to buy solutions to everything ranging from healthcare and emotional challenges to education, safety, and security needs. Citizen society, in contrast, nurtures “social and civic life” so that we work together to create and support healthier communities that meet their members’ educational, safety, security, and other needs. It’s clear that the authors are trying to move us from being armchair critics to being actively engaged in creating healthy, thriving, vibrant communities where connections foster success and a high quality of life.
“The greatest tragedy of the consumer life is that its practitioners do not see that the local community is abundant with the relationships [italics added for emphasis] that are the principal resource for rescuing themselves and their families from the failure, dependency, and isolation that are the results of a life as a consumer and client,” McKnight and Block suggest. “Their ships and sinking, and they struggle to swim to safety, ignoring the life raft at their side. The way to the good life is not through consumption. It is, instead, a path that we make by walking it with those who surround us. It is the way of a competent community recognizing its abundance” (p. 18).
The writers are explicit about the problems we create when we fail to acknowledge and build upon the abundance that remains untapped within communities: we marginalize nature to such a degree that we lose sight of much of the beauty that surrounds us and the numerous benefits we might draw from nature; we surrender to marketing efforts that create and then require additional resources to alleviate dissatisfaction in our lives; we pay attention to little more than we can immediately see, thereby missing the opportunity to operate within a larger, more positive framework; and we become slaves to debt rather than freeing ourselves by having a goal of living within our means (p. 50).
They are equally explicit about the numerous, simple achievable changes we can make to address these challenges, e.g., learning “how to fix what is broken rather than replacing it. Shopping when we really need something, not shopping as a form of recreation.” And at a larger level, shifting from a primary focus on immediate challenges and needs to a focus that includes “a future orientation” (p. 54).
The abundant community that McKnight and Block want to help us strengthen is built upon several core beliefs that too few of us recognize: that what we have is enough; that we have the capacity to produce what we need; that cooperation and satisfaction provide a framework for organizing our world; that we each have definable responsibilities for and toward each other; and that there is a basic undeniable reality to the human condition within which we must live. The communities that incorporate these beliefs into daily practices are rooted in focusing on the individual gifts we bring to our communities, nurturing “associational life,” and offering hospitality to everyone—an idea based on a commitment of welcoming strangers to our communities rather than creating barriers to their acceptance (pp. 66-67).
And when we set aside all the theorizing and rethink our way into putting this into the familiar context of our own communities, we see that we’re really not talking about much more than what already exists in those that are successful. A neighborhood association (like San Francisco’s Inner Sunset Park Neighbors) that consistently improves the quality of life for significant numbers of people draws from all these ideas and practices. As does a local, regional, or national association organized around a specific profession (e.g., the American Society for Training & Development, which creates a tremendous learning community for those of us involved in workplace learning and performance, AKA staff training). And as is the case with the volunteer-driven community-based Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.
There are literally thousands of organizations like this all over our country and beyond our own borders. The challenge for all of us is to recognize them, appreciate them, and support them through our own involvement regardless of whether we can only give a few minutes/a couple of hours/a few dollars a month or whether we recognize that we are ready to become more deeply engaged through deeper commitments—not only to those entities but to the greater extended abundant communities that would not exist without them.
In his concluding remarks within the 36-page document (available free of charge to paying members of the Guild), he reminds us that social learning “usually means a learner being more active in the [learning] experience, connecting, creating, and curating ideas.” He also suggests that our “role as learning professionals” may be undergoing a shift from “creating simple and accessible learning resources” to “curating content that already exists.”
It’s a theme that was discussed among colleagues a couple of years ago at an American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) conference—we were acknowledging the fact that we had created so much content that users were having trouble locating and accessing it. The theme is also an essential element in the shifting responsibilities colleagues are assuming in libraries all over the country. Which leads me to think that if members of library staff continue to more fully embrace lifelong learning as part of their natural responsibilities and services—it’s a commitment that already exists in the American Library Association (ALA)2015 Strategic Plan, where the need “to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all” is part of the organization’s mission statement, and in ASTD, where the mission is to “empower professionals to develop knowledge and skills successfully”—we could be looking at very effective partnerships between library staff and members of ASTD itself since we’re all working toward the same goal: meeting an overwhelming need for effective learning opportunities in an onsite-online world where those who stop learning will be left behind.
Betts, in Social Learning, does a fantastic job of helping us frame the discussion as to how we can better meet a tremendous need. The questions he asks focus on needs and results and set a positive context by beginning with the question “What Is Social Learning?”; continuing with questions about the benefits of social learning and business risks of leveraging social learning; and moving through a review of existing frameworks, ways to generate value from social learning, tools of social learning, measuring success in social learning, and our own roles in the field.
By the time we have completed this wonderfully inspiring and straightforward journey with him, we’re in a position to see that the instructional/learning and information-management skills required of workplace learning and performance (staff training) practitioners and library staff have never been more overlapping. It’s as if this need to combine learning, information sharing/literacy, and content curation is priming us for a merger of ASTD and ALA into an International Society for Training, Learning, Information Literacy, and Content Creation/Curation (although I have to admit that the acronym doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue—ASTLILCCC?—and may need a bit of work even as a Twitterhashtag).
Betts is very effective in helping us understand what already is in place—social learning (learning that is not entirely dependent on formal teacher-trainer-instructors) is hardly a new concept or practice—and what is changing (social learning, he suggests, has been co-opted by members of the e-learning industry to be about “how we learn from one another via digital devices”). But there’s no denying the positive role social learning plays whether we are discussing online, face-to-face, or blended learning. Collaborative/social learning clearly produces positive results for the learners and those they ultimately serve, as he consistently documents throughout his report, and social learning augments formal learning in addition to supporting professional learning and individual’s self-organized learning endeavors.
He reminds his readers that effective social learning, like any form of effective learning, starts with efforts to assure that “your approach makes sense” within the context in which we are designing and implementing it. He suggest that we pay equal attention to the people we are serving, the objectives we are establishing, the strategies we will use, and whatever technology will help us foster the social-learning endeavors we are implementing.
In attempting to generate value, we are encouraged by Betts to engage in instructional scaffolding—“creating a supporting framework for learners to gradually grow in confidence in a new area until they are fully able to support themselves.” And he reminds us that we are building toward success if we use social media tools our learners already use and like rather than trying to develop new tools that learners will only reluctantly embrace, if at all.
“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that workplace uptake of social technologies has been slow when most of us can’t use the tools we’d prefer,” he says near the end of the report, offering a learning nugget that ought to be plastered all over the physical and virtual walls of every trainer-teacher-learners’ workspace to help keep us on track toward fostering effective learning.
He brings us to a strong conclusion by suggesting that we engage in a collaborative learning cycle: design for performance improvement; support existing communities; create, source, and curate resources; leverage appropriate technologies; champion effective social learning; and measure and prove impact.
If those of us who are not already seamlessly moving between libraries and other learning organizations are inspired to reach across the aisle by what Betts writes, we may help bring to fruition the wonderful goal ASTD has so consistently proposed: “creating a world that works better.”
A grand jury’s conclusion that “San Francisco’s City Technology Needs a Culture Shock” inadvertently points toward opportunities for those of us involved in workplace learning and performance (staff training) endeavors regardless of where we are living.
“Déjà Vu All Over Again,” the recently-released City and County of San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report, documents the deplorable state of technology coordination and usage at the local government level. And this clearly is not a new or local issue; those of us who follow tech news have seen numerous examples of how our colleagues in government struggle—or don’t even attempt—to effectively incorporate the use of available technology into the workplace to better serve constituents. Think of the situation that led to the formation of the United States Department of Homeland Security when it was clear that the FBI, CIA, and others were far from up to date in their use of effective communication tools and practices. Or think of the sort of reports that have consistently documented the need for tech upgrades at the national level over the past decade or two. And think of what we see among our own workplace learning and performance colleagues if they still haven’t begun to build upon the practices documented by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner in The New Social Learning, in the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD)Social Media Toolkit for ASTD Chapter Leaders, or the other resources that continue to come our way on a regular basis.
While the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report deals primarily with the situation here in San Francisco at a high-level administrative level (the fact that seven different email systems are in use among City/County departments, for example), it also speaks to anyone involved in training-teaching-learning through its occasional—and, unfortunately, infrequent—references to the need for staff training. The fact is, the report is heavy on identifying and criticizing political leaders and chief information officers throughout the City and County of San Francisco for not working more cohesively and collaboratively to meet the tech challenges that face many of us on a daily basis, but is light on acknowledging the role teacher-trainer-learners might be playing in remedying the problems identified within the report and better preparing managers and employees to use the tech tools at their disposal.
Sparse references to providing training or staffing help desks means that the focus here remains on the acquisition of tech systems while underplaying the importance of assuring that those tasked with using those systems are prepared to fully incorporate them into the work of serving constituents.
If we continue advocating for creative, cost-effective ways to support our colleagues to meet their learning needs, we provide the foundations for the sort of tech-savvy workforce that, as ASTD so often says, creates a world that works better. If, through our own training-teaching-learning efforts, we provide examples of how this can be accomplished, we become part of the solution. And, if we’re lucky, we help nurture exactly the sort of culture shock that San Francisco and other municipalities so clearly need in a world where change and learning are constant.
From what has been reported to date, Lehrer’s first completely inexcusable mistake in Imagine was to fabricate quotes and add a made-up sentence to an actual quote from singer-songwriter Bob Dylan—an amazingly bad lapse of judgment given that much of the material with which Lehrer was working in Imagine appears to have already provided ample support to points he was making about how the creative process works. He then reportedly compounded the error by engaging in an extended game of obfuscation over a three-week period with writer Michael C. Moynihan, who documented the initial fabrications and his exchanges with Lehrer on the subject in an article published in Tablet Magazine this week. Lehrer’s work, furthermore, has been questioned and criticized by others, including a reviewer for The New York Times who raised plenty of questions about Lehrer’s conclusions drawn from research he cited after an earlier reviewer for the newspaper had praised the book.
What made Imagine so appealing to so many of us when it was released earlier this year was that Lehrer’s writing was so clear and crisp; his summaries of numerous research studies seemed well supported through citations in the book’s endnotes; and his conclusions seemed to be consistent with what we had seen from other writers and studies. It inspired us to recommend the book in our own reviews and essays and to connect Lehrer’s work to fields in which we work, as I did in a piece written for the American Society of Training & Development (ASTD) Learning Technology online community of practice.
So the news that this apparently wonderful, engaging, and thought-provoking book has, overnight, almost completely disappeared from bookstores and websites, and will apparently only remain available through libraries or on the shelves of those of us who obtained copies before the publisher’s understandable recall, is extremely dispiriting.
I’ve never before faced the situation where a book has been recalled after I had so favorably written about it and also used it as a jumping off point for the sort of piece I wrote for ASTD; the news that the book had been pulled, therefore, left me wondering how to handle a revelation like that one in an age where we can actually withdraw our online reviews and even ask that an online article be withdrawn. The dilemma sent me back to re-read the brief online review I posted on a few sites and to also reread that ASTD article. And when I was finished, I walked away with extremely mixed feelings: on the one hand, I felt that what I had been inspired to write for the ASTD posting still had value, so I’m not going to ask that it go the way of the book itself and be withdrawn; on the other hand, I have already deleted the online reviews since it seems silly to offer any type of rating or critique for a book that a publisher has pulled back.
Ultimately, because I do still believe the book as published had—and still has—value in making us think creatively about the science of the creative process—even though, by Lehrer’s own admission, he was irresponsibly creative in imagining quotes for attribution—I’m going to keep an earlier blog posting online, along with an acknowledgment that the book has been withdrawn—as a reminder of how a good book could have been a great book if the writer had been faithful to the basic precepts of accuracy in nonfiction writing. As a reminder that the act of writing in an onsite-online world exposes us to greater scrutiny—and more assurance of comeuppance when deserved—than anything we’ve ever before experienced. And as a reminder that when a member of our extended community of writers takes a terribly wrong turn, the rest of us need to Imagine ourselves in that position—and avoid it at all costs.
We could easily make the mistake of thinking that Mark Samuel’s thoughtful and thought-provoking book Making Yourself Indispensable is all about us. But we don’t, as trainer-teacher-learners who need to be playing leadership roles in the organizations we serve, have to move very far into his work to see that Samuel has his sights on more than individual endeavors—and his well-received presentation on the topic for ASTDOrange County Chapter members last month shows that his message resonates with our colleagues.
You are “not indispensable unless you use your gifts and principles in service to other people’s success, improvement, or survival,” Samuel suggests (p. 13), and it’s a theme that makes what otherwise could have been a very self-centered endeavor take on much greater importance for all of us and those we serve.
If, in fact, we move directly from the book surveyed in the first of these two articles (Eli Mina’s 101 Boardroom Problems [and How to Solve Them])–a book that helps us understand the structure behind effectively facilitating meetings and dealing effectively with leadership issues—into Samuel’s exploration of how our actions to support the organizations we serve can foster results that go far beyond what any of us can accomplish alone, we have two interdependent points of view that effectively help us understand how the act of embracing and encouraging interdependence makes us—and our organizations—indispensable.
Samuel’s work is centered on a personal accountability model. He first takes us through what he calls “the victim loop,” where we ignore and deny problems; blame others for situations we ourselves could be correcting; rationalize actions or situations we could be changing; resist change; or simply hide from what we need to be addressing. He then offers an accountability loop that begins with us recognizing and owning situations requiring our attention and action; forgiving ourselves and others for what has not already been done; and engaging in a level of self-examination that leads to effective learning which, in turn, produces action.
“Truly playing big is about using your talents and gifts in service to a cause greater than yourself,” he reminds us repeatedly. “Playing big is linked to your purpose” (p. 26)—an action that he quickly connects back to the path that allows any of us to serve as leaders “regardless of your position” (p. 42).
The theme of interdependence is never far from the surface here. In fact, it’s an essential part of being successful and fostering success within an organization: “Ask for assistance!” he insists (p. 94), and remember that in sharing our unresolved challenges, we may learn from the success stories that colleagues will offer as guidance in our moments of need—a practice encouraged in ASTD through the Sharing Our Success program for chapter leaders.
One of Samuel’s greatest achievements in the book is his effective use of anecdotes that help us viscerally understand the points he makes—a practice that extends to an admission that he almost lost his own thriving business by ignoring the very lessons he had been helping others to absorb. We can’t help but appreciate and learn from his frank discussion of the situation: “It didn’t matter how many times I had taught the Personal Accountability Model; I was now immersed in my humanness and experiencing all of the pain and suffering that comes from victimization.” We certainly walk away from that particular sharing-our-lack-of-success story inspired by how much his own self-examination and honesty shows that we, too, can make a positive difference if we’re willing to learn and take action rather than succumbing to the lethargy that at one time or another threatens every one of us.
Trainer-teacher-learners also can’t help but react positively to Samuel’s focus, late in the book, to how much the learning process is part of our efforts to be indispensable in the terms outlined in this book. Beginning with writer-futurist Alvin Toffler’s assertion that “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn,” Samuel reminds us that we need to continue learning—and implementing what we learn—rather than hiding behind timeworn clichés about how we’re doing what we do simply because that’s the way things have always been done.
“Learning,” he suggests, is “the outcome of every relationship we are in and every action we take” (p. 161); if we approach our relationships with the spirit of teaching-training-learning that is at the heart of all we do, we’re likely to reach one of the many useful conclusions Samuel offers: “Being indispensable doesn’t start and stop with whatever job you are currently in. It is a lasting state based on the value you represent to others” (p. 115).
Ultimately, he concludes, we find an ironic guiding principle to making ourselves indispensable: “…you gain your independence not when you act in your own best interest but when you realize your interdependence and act in a way that serves both others and yourself” (p. 210). And if that makes us more cognizant of the value of both leading and participating in the meetings and other activities that comprise so much of our work day, we will be well on our way to having more successes to share.
At the heart of this endeavor is the open movement—the latest of the five massive themes that we’re exploring in two-week bite-sized segments within #etmooc (an online Educational Technology & Media course), that massive open online course (MOOC) developed by Alec Couros and his wonderful gang of “conspirators.” The course itself is a living example of the spirit of open, and it is quite literally transforming not only those who are directly participating in it, but also those who are learning about it and participating vicariously through the blog postings we are producing and sharing openly, the Blackboard Collaborative sessions that are archived and openly available, the live tweet chat sessions and numerous unfacilitated stream of tweets it is generating, exchanges in a Google+ Community, YouTube videos, and various other rhizomatically spreading learning opportunities that will continue having an impact on learners worldwide long after the current January- March 2013 offering comes to an end.
To watch the recording of that hour-long Google+ Hangout panel discussion is to sense the power of online learning and engagement while receiving a full immersion that leaves us with hours of material to return to at our own leisure. We see and hear Mozilla Foundation staffers sharing resources and encouraging us to participate in them, e.g., through the Mozilla Festival and efforts to help define digital literacy. We learn about a magnificent repository of open resources curated under the title “Open High School of Utah OER [Open Educational Resources] Guide” under the auspices of the Open High School of Utah (which will become Mountain Heights Academy in fall 2013). We hear panelist Christina Cantrill, from the National Writing Project, suggest that open is about resources, but “is also about practices.” And we walk away from the session with a clear understanding that four basic tenets of the open movement are reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing content without losing site of the fact that we still have an obligation to acknowledge the sources upon which we draw.
Posted by paulsignorelli 
