Dave's Whiteboard

This post is my slightly-belated contribution to the May 2009 Working/Learning blog carnival, hosted at Kevin Jones’s Engaged Learning blog.

The CSTD National Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia has just ended.  The theme was All hands on deck–because organizations need to get the most out of all their employees, and because you can’t escape the sea in Nova Scotia any more than you can escape tartan.

I was eager to make a presentation at this session, and fortunately for me, CSTD liked what I proposed doing.  I think that speaking to your professional peers–in the sense of  “here’s something interesting I’ve been working on”–is a great opportunity.

On a ship, of course, a deck is a workplace–it’s where you are.  As a learning professional, I want to make sure my personal deck has the equipment and room I need to be effective.  Here are my thoughts on ways to do that:

Do what matters.

The obvious thing is to work on great projects.  In my experience, you don’t always know which ones will turn out to be great.  And in larger organizations, you sometimes have little choice.  Inside nearly every project, though, there are things that matter–to you and to your organization.  So, whatever the work you have to do, do it well.  Go beyond the routine; avoid sticking to the same old paths.

Change your level.

I don’t mean “get promoted,” necessarily.  I mean to zoom in to the details of what you do, and zoom out to see things in a larger perspective.  If you’re developing training courses for customs workers, find out how the particular skills fit into the larger context of their jobs, and how their jobs fit into the context of their location and their agency.

The old story about turtles all the way down in one sense is true.  It’s systems all the way down, and all the way up: inputs, processes, outputs.  Changing your level means you’re better able to see how what looked like a standalone function aligns with other functions for some higher-level process.

Watch yourself.

Along with changing your level, I think it makes a lot of sense to change your distance from yourself.  Ask, explicitly, what you’re doing.  Where are you running into difficulty?  What are you doing about that?

From another angle: what have you been doing that you get jazzed about?  A couple of weeks back, I was bouncing in my chair (during a meeting with clients who have been too polite to comment on this) because of the many great ideas and possibilities that were emerging.

It’s this self-awareness, almost the idea that your job is a kind of science experiment, that I think holds great value.

Think of others.

If the reflective question was “What have I been doing?” then the collaborative question is “How’s my problem like problems that aren’t mine?”

What have you been doing that someone who’s doing something different could learn from?  What have you figured out that I haven’t?

I saw a definition of “expert” as someone who knows something you don’t, that you’re glad to learn.  If you pay attention to your work, if you change levels so you get a fuller picture, and if you watch what you do and what results, you’re going to be a hell of an expert on the specifics.

The next step is stripping the trivial out of those specifics so that another person can extrapolate to a different situation.

Be yourself.

I’m not an expert on using web 2.0 tools at work.  I tried to make that clear in my presentation: I’ve learned how to work with some of these tools, and I can show you:

• Stuff other people have done with them
• Ways to try out the tools for yourself
• A little bit about how they look under the hood

I didn’t pretend to know more than I do, nor (I hope) am I over-impressed by my own sagacity.  I had fun creating my presentation, I tried to be clear about who might find it interesting, and I had lots of chances to practice saying, “I don’t know much about XXX; tell me more about what you’re doing.”

Few things will make you smarter about what you do than trying to explain what you do to others in a way that can benefit them.

CC-licensed turtle photo by wwarby.