2012_09_17 Community Management IMG_0841 (Photo credit: joelogon)
OK, so I’m stepping away from the fire hose for a moment. I’m today wrapping up, if that even makes sense when you’re on the road, week #5 in my new gig as Senior Community Manager at SDL. Collecting and prioritizing my thoughts and experiences will likely take some time, if only because so many of them do not categorize very simply.
Illustration by John Tenniel of the Red Queen lecturing Alice for Lewis Carroll’s “Through The Looking Glass” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have been in a number of conversations lately where my colleagues and friends are grappling with staying on top of their game, so to speak, both online and in the office. Not only are we coping with the well-known information overload, but we have the desire to improve, deepen and expand our skills, knowledge and expertise. Each of us is evolving a methodology to accomplish this, but it changes a lot and, with so much change, it can be difficult to feel like you’re really progressing. It feels so much like the Red Queen‘s comment in Lewis Carroll‘s Through The Looking-Glass : “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Lees hier hoe je een MOOC kunt opzetten! Massive Open Online Courses deel 1 door Inge de Waard http://t.co/RbLAijLd @Ignatia (Photo credit: Trendmatcher)
I’ve noted a sea change in education and learning about which there has been quite a bit of virtual ink spilled. The phenomenon known as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) has been added to the education lexicon, much to the joy of futurists, learners everywhere, and to the consternation of a number of university and college administrators. Like most things, I can see the light and the dark, along with the difficult.
Image via Wikipedia
It’s true…..this space has been as dead as a bag of hammers for a couple of months. I’ve switched companies and jobs, and that has made for a very exciting and immersive few weeks.
I’ve switched jobs before. I worked for my previous employer for 14 years and had a number of positions, each a challenge and none of them easy. Learning the ropes, discovering who were the go-to people on the team, what were the local processes for getting things done and re-jiggering my goals and deliverables for the new gig always took a bit of time, but the corporate culture was basically the same (there were actually some differences between business groups, but I learned early on that was the norm for my company). I didn’t have to learn a new repository of information, a new information discovery tree or deal with a new way of thinking about what we did, as a company.
THAT has changed.
Boy Howdy….
Image via Wikipedia
When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.
This is just such a post.
Image via Wikipedia
When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.
This is just such a post.
Image via Wikipedia
I have been thinking about a post by Tac Anderson on his NewCommBiz blog about making mistakes, crisis-based decision making and how we learn. It specifically got me thinking about organizations that learn and those that don’t really, or at least not very well (or easily).
Things move terribly fast in today’s marketplace and the halls of business. We blame it on the Internet, on the 24-hour news cycle, on our growing propensity for being “always on and connected” and on “everyone else.” There have been countless barrels of ink spilled on the importance of failure for learning, both as individuals and organizations. Even just thinking about how you learn personally will confront you with the first attempt at doing something, assessing how well that went, tweaking, trying again, etc.
So why do we not get it? I’m not saying we drive for failure (although that seems to be the direction of some I’ve noticed….), but, short of life-and-death, why do we not accept that failing is at least as important as not failing?
I’ve begun teaching my fall class in social media in business and have led the group in a collective moan about the sheer volume of data and information available, some of it valuable, but much of it ancillary at best and junk/noise at the far end of personal/professional value. It’s pretty easy to sell a good set of filters to allow the really good stuff onto our desktops and ignore the rest.
But at what cost?
Image by wayne’s eye view via Flickr
My Dad had two primary refuges from work and my brother and me. In the winter it was his shop in the garage and in the summer it was the yard and the garden. He had apparently inherited the ability to grow almost anything from my grandmother. She could take a fallen, brown leaf from a plant and nurture it into full health in the space of a year or two…..amazing.
One of the things I used to kid him about was his penchant for regularly moving shrubs, bushes and sometimes trees from one spot to another around our yard. We used to joke that he was never happy with where God put them and was trying to improve the arrangement. The moved item always seemed to thrive anew, regardless of where he planted it. Now I see what he was doing in a different light.
Image by wayne’s eye view via Flickr
My Dad had two primary refuges from work and my brother and me. In the winter it was his shop in the garage and in the summer it was the yard and the garden. He had apparently inherited the ability to grow almost anything from my grandmother. She could take a fallen, brown leaf from a plant and nurture it into full health in the space of a year or two…..amazing.
One of the things I used to kid him about was his penchant for regularly moving shrubs, bushes and sometimes trees from one spot to another around our yard. We used to joke that he was never happy with where God put them and was trying to improve the arrangement. The moved item always seemed to thrive anew, regardless of where he planted it. Now I see what he was doing in a different light.
Authentic Voice 