Blog matroyshka

At the risk of this getting a bit meta, I thought I would blog about my process of blogging and communication more widely. The reason and inspiration for this post is a request from my manager to talk about Twitter, Google+ communities and blogs at the Organisational Development team meeting. I'm going to present (in some way) this post at the meeting, so I will be communicating to my team about blogs, using a blog as an example, hence blog matroyshka. It made sense in my head anyway!

As a team, we use Twitter and Google+ as part of the way in which we communicate about what we are doing. Due to the low number of followers we have on Twitter, we cannot use this as our sole means of communication, and the Google+ community is supposed to be a place for all University staff to share information on personal and professional development, so it doesn't belong to the Staff Development team. Therefore there are limitations with both of these methods, however they do provide a way for us to share information quickly and informally with people who are interested enough in what we might have to say to follow us on Twitter, or have engaged with development by joining the community.

But using these methods has presented us with challenges. As a team, we share responsibility for tweeting from our account. Something we struggled with was around the 'voice' of our account, and whether this should be consistent.  This was something that was actually quite tricky to achieve, and we asked questions like "what would our voice sound like" or "should we sign each tweet" or "should a person have responsibility for a week". We decided however that we would all have access to the account and tweet when we wanted to.

A challenge with Twitter that I don't think we've resolved yet is tweeting enough. One way to think about Twitter is it's like standing in the centre of Meadowhall and shouting to everyone about what you are going to buy. It sounds embarrassing, and I'm sure you would get funny looks! However, doing it once isn't enough, you need to keep shouting, and shout about different stuff, about what you had for lunch, about how you feel, about what everyone else is buying or eating, asking what other people are thinking of buying, or if they are getting the tram home, and so on. You need to come back day after day, shouting all the time. In Meadowhall, you couldn't keep this up for long without getting kicked out, but let's imagine that people don't come to Meadowhall to shop, they come to listen to people shouting, you need to shout the right things to get people to listen to you. And you're not the only person shouting, there are millions of other people all shouting at the same time, and you're all competing to get people to listen to you and only you, and trying to shout the loudest or the most profound or amusing or interesting or offensive thing.

Except of course, you aren't.

Twitter is a mass of noise, but I don't think that means you have to try and be louder or more overwhelming than the rest of it, you need to try and be a part of it that people will want to listen to. It is up to the listener to tune out what parts of Twitter they don't want to hear by following and unfollowing people. What we need to get better at is being ourselves more, and reflecting who we are as a team in how we tweet, for instance by putting our team photo on there. We also need to tweet more and about things other than just big announcements. In a way we perhaps need to think about how we can be quiet.

I am really pleased with how the Google+ community is developing and growing. Colleagues from around the University are engaging with the content on the community, and contributing items themselves for discussion. This is great because although we set up and moderate the community, it isn't the Staff Development team's community. It would be great if in time the majority of content was generated by community members, and for community members to become moderators. However, I think this will take time, but I don't think this is impossible.

The final communication tool I am going to cover is this blog, although I hesitate to call it a communication tool. This is because I'm not really sure who the audience is. I know one person who reads it, who for all I know may be the only person who reads it, and that's me. There is definitely something solipsistic and self-serving about blogging, but I don't think I can shy away from that. As a reflective exercise, I have found it really useful as a way to think about what I am doing in a new light, and gain insights into why I do things the way I do. I don't write it to share my wisdom with others, because I don't think I have wisdom with which to enlighten others. However, I have done some things, and written about what I learnt, which if other people read and take something from, then great.

I could of course keep a diary, which would help me to reflect on my own experiences, without it being a big public sharing. Sometimes, I also think "Do I need to get my manager, or her manager, or her manager to approve what I'm saying", or worry about what people will think about me if I write about a particular topic (such as I am doing now!). However, something that I have blogged about previously is the idea that development is everywhere, so in some ways this blog is a way to demonstrate that with an actual example of how someone can learn and develop from lots of different experiences that they have. It could also serve as an example of how we can share our experiences with each other. Or I could just be shouting in Meadowhall.

Out with the old...

In the next week or so we will be launching our autumn programme of development courses. This will be the last time we launch a programme in this way, as by January 2014, we will be delivering development in a different way. This is a very big change for us and how we operate, which we knew was coming, but it feels a lot more real now!

Another big change is the launch of the interim Learning Management System. As the previous one has broken, CiCS have worked very hard to develop a temporary replacement for us. Here's a screenshot as a teaser.

It looks really good, and works on smartphones and tablets, so you can access and book onto development activities from wherever you are (sounds familiar somehow!?).

We are in the very early stages of thinking about what system we may need as an organisation to support development activity, so there will hopefully be more changes to come to the LMS.

So what am I going to ask you to think about this time? We want our development offering to be more responsive, both to the needs of the University but also to the needs of individual colleagues. We also think community and sharing ideas is really important as there is a lot we can learn from each other. With this in mind, we put together a poster, including our four themes, asking "how are you going to develop your skills in these four areas?", and this is the question I would like you to answer. Your responses will be really helpful to us, to give us ideas for how development can be supported, but also to your colleagues, to hopefully prompt thoughts like "That's a good idea, I might give that a go as well".

Here's the poster:

Development everywhere

A phrase that is forming an important part of our repositioning work is development everywhere. I've used it in the title of my blog, and I think I said that I would explain it in an earlier post. So what does it mean, and why is it important to us?

We wanted to come up with a phrase that really encapsulated what we were trying to achieve with our new offering, which we wanted to be more flexible, not relying solely on courses to attend, as well as being something that is more widely used than currently. Development everywhere was one of the first phrases we came up with. We tried adding to it, "Your development everywhere", "Development everywhere for everyone", but these didn't seem to have the same impact as the shorter version, so we went back to it.

I'll try to explain what I think it means, and why I think it is important, using a story from my experience. I started work at the University in 2004, having graduated with a degree in Philosophy in 2003. As part of my induction I had a meeting with the then Director of Human Resource Management, Rosie Valerio. Rosie asked me lots of questions about myself, my work experience, education and I'm sure plenty of other things. We talked about my degree, and what I had studied, and then she asked me a question which has stuck with me, which was "What are you doing to make sure you keep learning?" I thought for a bit, and I gave some answer (shamefully) along the lines of "I haven't really kept up with philosophy since finishing". But I had missed the point, as Rosie pointed out that we are all always learning and developing. And she is right, we don't stand still, we don't do our job or act in exactly the same way as we did last year or the year before, we change and we develop and we learn.

So how is this story relevant to development everywhere? I think this phrase is a reminder for us all as individuals to think about all the experiences we have, and reflect on how they have changed what we do. Development isn't limited to the time we spend on courses, it's about the totality of our experience and the effect it has on our action. We learn a lot from trying things out, seeing what works and what doesn't and then trying again (see my previous post What a to do...list). Our repositioned offering therefore needs to encourage people to try different things, but also to help us to remember that this is an important part of our development, and that we can learn something from everything that we do/

As I seem to be doing a lot, I'll end on a question, and it seems apt that I ask you a question that has been asked of me in the past. What are you doing to make sure you keep learning?

What a to do...list

It's been a while since I posted last, but quite a lot has happened since then. As a team, we've started to pull together the outcomes of our research to help us begin to plan what our new offering will look like, and what we are going to focus on when we launch. Our next steps will be to start thinking about a framework for our website, as this will be the key way that colleagues access development.

Something that has taken up a fair bit of my time is the Learning Management System giving up the ghost. A couple of weeks ago, CiCS informed me that the LMS had experienced a number of kernel panics, and that the system was at risk. I don't know what a kernel panic is, but it didn't sound good, so I made the decision to remove the links to LMS from our website. This has meant we have had to manage course bookings manually, which is a bit more administration for us. We are currently working in collaboration with colleagues in other departments on interim options to replace LMS before our September courses start, but also looking at a more long term replacement.

Which brings me on to what I wanted to talk about in this post, how to manage my workload. Most people I know keep to do lists so they know what tasks they have coming up. I am no exception. Where I might be an exception is that I do not use paper at all, let alone keep a paper diary. Here is a picture of my paper free (photos don't count!) desk for proof.

What I want is an electronic way of keeping a task list, that enables me to balance the different and changing priorities that I'm faced with. I used to use Astrid, but they were acquired by Yahoo, and will shortly be no longer providing a service. Astrid worked by allowing you to set tasks with a due date, levels of priority, sync your tasks across mobile devices and a friendly octopus (the eponymous Astrid) would give you reminders, encouragement and praise for completing tasks.

I've been trying to find a replacement, but I'm not quite sure I've found the right thing yet. I've been using Any.Do for a few months, which enables you to say what are you going to do today, tomorrow, upcoming and someday.

Every day, it asks you to have an "Any.Do moment", where you have to go through everything you have said you will do that day and either commit to do it or postpone it. If you do tasks you get Kiip rewards.

I was finding that my tasks weren't syncing consistently between my phone, tablet and computer, so I didn't really feel like I had an accurate list of tasks.

As a result of this, I'm trying some new things DropTask and Trello.

DropTask is perhaps the least familiar type of task list, as it groups tasks visually into bubbles, and looks like this:

This is currently only a web based service, with no Android app, so doesn't fully meet my needs (I won't be able to access or add to my task list without a web connection). But what it seems to be really good for is visualising and collaborating on tasks. You can group bubbles of tasks together, and the size of each bubble changes based on the priority. You can also share this task list with other people, so I've set up one for our repositioning project to trial the collaborative aspect.

The final one I'm trying, which might be a winner, although I'm not sure yet is Trello. This works by setting up lists for different topics called boards. It is all fully customisable so you can call boards whatever you like, and have as many as you want. It has got Android apps, as well as a web access point, and you can prioritise tasks and get reminders.

At first glance it seems to tick a lot of boxes, but I guess I need to use it for a while to see if it actually does work for me. I think this is the key learning point for me, in that there is no right way of doing things, and that you shouldn't be afraid to change. Sometimes you need to change because of external circumstances (in my case Astrid closing down), other times because you don't feel things are working (Any.Do). The challenge that this presents is taking ownership of the change, and coming up with a solution to the problem that meets your needs.

In the spirit of sharing knowledge, I really want to hear what works for you, and how you've changed and adapted your approach over time. What would be great to hear is what you think you are going to do next.

Bringing it all together

Now that I've completed my first sweep of research, my next challenge is to think how to pull this together into something that can start to inform what we offer to staff in terms of development. Despite the best efforts of the Learning Management System to sabotage writing this post (http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hr/sld/lms/index), here are my thoughts so far.

Innovation & Business Skills Australia (IBSA), which is an Australian Government authorised skills council to advise on vocational education and training, identify six key areas for development in relation to innovation skills.

1. Interpret - How do we understand the issue we are facing?
2. Generate - How do we create ideas to respond to the issue?
3. Collaborate - How do we involve others in creating responses?
4. Reflect - How do we bring the outcomes of the first three stages together into something more coherent?
5. Represent - How do we present this more coherent set of ideas?
6. Evaluate - How do we test the idea to make sure it meets the original brief?

This seems to be an appealing description of what is involved in innovation, as it feels like how I have approached this research. I have spent time trying to understand innovation, and am now starting to generate ideas. I'm involving you, as readers of this blog in the research by encouraging you to comment, and will also be working with the rest of the team to collaborate on ideas. Then there will need to be work to fit this research into our new staff development offering, and evaluating its success.

At each of these stages, there are different development activities that could be undertaken, for instance to support generation you could develop focus group management, or give tools to support brainstorming and lateral thinking. Developing project management and networking skills could support the collaborative process. These are the kind of development activities that we could also offer, and we'll need to think about what would be of most benefit.

What I think is interesting is that there is no development suggested on how to be innovative, it is about getting people in the right creative space to be innovative. The challenge for us therefore thinking about what we can do to get people in the right creative space. I don't expect that we can get Pixar style beach huts for us to customise, or a whiteboard lined egg, but what else is there that we can do that feels right for the University of Sheffield? This reflective translation of ideas from elsewhere into practice at Sheffield will develop and emerge over the coming weeks and months, but some initial ideas I've had are:

• Internal conferences to share innovations and increase opportunities for networking and collaboration
• Walking discussion groups as a way to discuss particular topics, but outside the constraints of the office
• A series of podcasts where experts from around the University can share their experiences of being innovative

The final video I would like to share with you from my research is another TED talk, by David Kelley co-founder of design consultancy IDEO. The reason why I am sharing this is partly so I can remind myself of the importance of having the confidence to try something different. The outcomes of this whole project will be something quite different to how development is currently delivered, and there will be a need for us to be confident in the changes we are bringing about.

Innovating with others

This was the most inspiring element of the research that I have been carrying out, for the simple realisation that you don't have to be innovative on your own. I found there to be a number of reasons for this. The first of which is to do with where ideas come from. I spent some time watching TED talks (which I recommend doing, as there are lot of interesting talks on there, covering a huge range of subjects) to find out what other people say on innovation.

This talk from Rodney Mullen, professional skateboarder, covers how the development of skateboard tricks comes not only from an individual's skill, but as a product of the environment they find themselves in and the community surrounding them. So although his skill is important, how those ideas he has stick and get developed is down to how he fits into his surroundings.

An entertaining and thought provoking series of films by film-maker Kirby Ferguson called Everything Is A Remix argues that breakthroughs and advances come from using and combining old ideas and concepts, in order to create something new and different. Again, there is acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of the ideas of individuals to the ideas of others around them. A quote from Ferguson's TED talk that resonated with me was "We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness. It's a liberation from our misconceptions, and it's an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin".

This talk from Steven Johnson, on "Where good ideas come from", outlines how ideas grow from networks with other people with other ideas, and the evolution of our own thoughts over time. Johnson tells a story of how innovations happen, which highlights that sometimes we start off working on a particular issue, but develops and changes over time to be something completely different and unintended.

As stimulating as all of this might be, how does this affect what our provision of development activity contains? Something we could think about is providing tools and techniques for individuals and teams to use to help facilitate this creative process. It also highlights the importance of encouraging group discussion and sharing of ideas in development events, in order that the evolution of ideas and thoughts can continue. There is plenty to think about and digest!

A space to innovate

This aspect of innovation was a lot of fun to research! I looked at lots of different office spaces, and how company's use their surroundings to support the creative process.

An example of how a whole office building is built around encouraging creativity and collaboration is the animation studio Pixar. The linked article has more examples and information, but a key point is that employees are encouraged through how the building is arranged to meet and work with each other, which leads to more creative ideas being generated. Another point is that employees have control over their own workspace, so they can design it to look how they want.

Picture from officesnapshots.com

A smaller scale example is MindLab in Denmark, which is "a cross-ministerial innovation unit which involves citizens and businesses in creating new solutions for society.". Part of what is available in MindLab is a brainstorming egg, an enclosed space with whiteboards for walls, where teams can share and swap ideas. Maybe a little claustrophobic, but definitely something to provide focus!

Obviously these kind of things are massive undertakings, and is something far, far beyond what we would be considering for our project! What is useful from these examples is to think about how the place in which we work can affect how creative and innovative we can be. If we are planning activities where we are looking for innovation and creative ideas, what can we do with the location to make it as conducive to creativity as possible?

On a personal note, what really helps me to feel creative is being able to look out of my office window at Weston Park. If I sit up in my chair I can see the ducks in the pond, but from my normal (slightly slumped) position I can see plenty of trees and sky, so there is plenty of space to stare into! This gives me a chance to let my mind wander a bit, which helps me when thinking around problems. I know I am lucky to have such a nice view, which this photo doesn't do justice to!

What do you do with your work area to help you get in the creative frame of mind?