It’s ironic because I advocate setting goals all the time; but when I do it for myself, I almost never reach them. Goals do leave me dissatisfied with my present (as Stephen Shapiro notes in his book Goal Free Living.) The idea of having  a theme, an idea that guides your decisions for the upcoming year, that acts as your compass is simple and achievable.

• What was my theme for last year? It would be stability: in my finances, where I live, building a community, in my new job, and in my health. It’s been a tough year.
• What would be my theme for next year? I’m thinking the word that feels right is flexibility. I want more flexibility in my work, how I work, in my travel schedule, social schedule, in my blogging and in my relationship (okay, that doesn’t quite mean what you might be thinking — I do not envision becoming a swinger.) I’ve been so rigid this past year, so focused in getting it right, and making my personal relationships suffer, now I need to flex. Let’s see where it takes me. I’ll check in again in a few months.

In 2009 I had participated in a class in social media and branding at Stanford, and was invited to speak at the new class the following year. I was struggling to define myself in the post-crash world and in a new world called California (oh so different than New York or Durham, North Carolina). The thinking and exercises I did on social media and brand as a part of that class were incredibly helpful.

It was helpful to remind myself of what I said then as it is still relevant and possibly even more important today: think about your value-add, what you bring to the marketplace, understand your “feature-set”, as well as think about an aspirational future and what you bring to that future — do you have the skillsets to support that future?

Watch and enjoy — would love to hear your comments on is it still relevant? What makes sense or doesn’t?

First, a few definitions of transmedia storytelling:

• “Telling a story that extends across multiple media platforms” (Lisa Hsia of Bravo Digital Media writing for Mashable)
• Where “elements of a story are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, each making their own unique contribution to the whole.” (Henry Jenkins debunking transmedia myths in Fast Company)

Lisa Hsia’s point is that interactive social TV is changing the way audiences engage with television. Henry Jenkins takes it further and adds that shows such as Glee “model new transmedia strategies to attract and sustain audience engagement.” You watch the show, you engage with the characters on Facebook, you read the Twitter stream, and maybe even add to the story.

Henry Jenkins makes a key point (you really should read his article) “Transmedia storytelling is still about the stories and if the stories do not capture the imagination, no amount of transmedia extension can repair the damage.”

And now to learning….

So why the heck does this excite me? Well, can you just imagine the possibilities for learning/organizational change?

• Say you’re trying to get a group of people to behave differently or think differently about a particular topic. Well, write an engaging storyline for them. Start with a set of characters that personify their lives.
• The audience watches the stories of the characters’ attempts to learn on a particular topic, then in the classroom the audience/participants engage in deconstructing the story and saying how they would have done it differently, what resources they should have used, what they should do next.
• At the close, they then pitch that idea to the “producers”, who then decide on the next story segment. And so it goes on for each class.
• The learning experience starts with each new cohort (defined as a group coming into the organization in a similar time frame.)
• Add in a fan page, a twitter stream, a game element, t-shirts, etc., all of which tell one aspect of the story or allow the audience to engage.

Back to Henry Jenkins: “Transmedia represents a strategy for telling stories where there is a particularly diverse set of characters, where the world is richly realized, and where there is a strong back-story or mythology that can extend beyond the specific episodes being depicted in the film or television series.”

I just have to keep reminding myself, start small, grow it over time. Time to make the ideas I’ve been exploring on creating the eLearning graphic novel into a franchise. Next episode coming soon….

A year after stepping through the looking glass into the world of full-time employment in a large company, I ask myself, “What was I thinking?”

I know exactly what I was thinking — the need to establish credibility, get a strong brand on my resume, support for my work, and opportunities to work on interesting problems. As I  re-read Part 1 of Through the looking glass I remember the apprehension I felt about going to work for a very large company. I remember being worried about how I would have to conform, change my identity and pretend to be what I was not. I remember thinking I would have to let go of my independent contractor identity as I accepted the rules of this new game. That was my main worry. None of that really came to pass in the way that I imagined.

• First, I did not expect my work to be so very virtual. Now, hear me out — I have done virtual. I love virtual. I’m a telecommuter. I believe that virtual is here to stay, and is the future of work. But whoa! Starting all your relationships virtually because you’re on a national team– now that’s hard. Not having any work reason to connect with people in my local office, that’s also hard. I realize now that I’ve always started face-to-face.
• But then it gets more interesting — I also am never on a consistent project team. That’s right – no intact teams. Not only are you relationships virtual, but you’re always remaking them as you move from project to project. That’s even harder. It means that on every project you are re-negotiating your role, understanding how others define their roles, and getting a good handle on their skills and capabilities. Most of the time, project teams don’t bother to do that “teaming” stuff because there’s too much work to do. They don’t bother to really understand each other as humans with 3-4 other projects going at the same time. Yet we come into these project teams loaded with expectations. At some point, always, you run into a snag, a bump, a wall of frustration.
• The work is lonely. I did not expect to feel so completely alone in my work. Yes, I’m on a project team, but as a learning designer/instructional designer — I’m suppose to be an expert, so all that “content-development stuff” or “working with SMEs stuff” is left to me. Very little collaboration. A lot of loneliness in the work. And even though I love working virtually, being a telecommuter, diving deep into the content, living in my introvert world — I deeply miss collaborating. To me, that’s the whole purpose of a team. Without that team collaboration, I might as well be on an assembly line. And you know what — it hurts. I miss it dearly.

That last paragraph was really hard to write.

Heres’ the good stuff -

• I do get to work on interesting projects and let my ideas run as wild — if I can convince others to run with me.
• I do have amazing people that I work with and for on a daily basis — I just don’t always get to collaborate with them.
• I am learning so much — about my capabilities, my value-add, what I do and don’t like doing, what I need to learn more about, about eLearning, and most importantly — about the dynamics of working in a large organization and the effort it takes to get alignment and stay on message.
• My identity has not been that changed — except that they require me to use my full legal name for my email – which sucks. And I have learned to filter my words and think about my intent in a given situation; and that’s all for the better, IMHO.
• I’ve also learned to appreciate the value of my past experiences — I’ve had incredible teams in the past, incredible mentors, incredible leaders. I deeply appreciate that I experienced those others in my life.
• I get to travel some, but not too much — so far.
• I meet incredible facilitators and coaches as a part of my work, and yes, get to work with them sometimes.
• I get the benefits that come from working in a large organization (yes, health, dental and a 401K are a nice to have). I never thought I’d say this — but I like that I have a number to call in case of a natural or other kind of disaster. It’s that paternalism of a large organization because it’s to their benefit that we are all healthy and taken care of. I’m a dual-citizen American/Canadian , so don’t get me started on who I think should really be providing that safety net.

As long as I’m still learning, and the good balances or even outweighs the bad, then it’s worth staying. But if that starts to shift, or if the work that I do is not longer aligned with my goals, then back through the looking glass I’ll go.

• The battlefield was more complex than originally anticipated. Remember that documentary with Robert McNamara – The Fog of War? He lists 11 lessons from the Vietnam War one of which is: “Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.”  I misjudged the the history, culture and politics of the organization in which I work. There were more “stakeholders” involved than I ever imagined; there was a “history” of negative results and repercussions emanating from those negative results that I was not fully aware of; and the importance of the organizational message outweighed the importance of the learner’s experience.
• My intentions were not clear. I intended to create a better learning experience for new joiners. But what was my intention for my team? I was
  not clear on those intentions. Had I been more aware of *who* was actually on the team, and making connections with them, then it probably would have helped to a certain degree.
• I didn’t want this battle and therefore cared less about it. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be in this space called on-boarding, therefore, I cared less. This impacted the two items listed above.
• There was simply too much going on in my working life. This is the usual excuse — I was overworked. Nothing new, most people who have jobs are overworked. So what I need
  to do is create space to reflect — daily or weekly — so I can control the emotions associated with being overwhelmed, and I don’t get lost in frustration.

The biggest learning for me —  I just have to be clearer on what projects I choose to be involved in, and which ones I choose not to be involved in, to the extent that I have a choice: don’t choose leaderless projects where you have the responsibility but no power. That is the definition of frustration.

Most organizations look like the seaweed picture in this post (a.k.a. Orbiting the Giant Hairball). Most organizations are a giant mess of tangled STUFF, in which people get tangled anytime they try to change anything or do creative work. How does one keep creative integrity and not get tangled and trapped?

The keys for me are: reflection, get clear on intentions, and be concious of the battlefield.

Unfortunately in this one, both I and the learners lost. The organization got airtime for it’s messages. People get to say “I consulted the right parts of the seaweed pile.” But the ultimate goal of the organization — retention and engaging new joiners in a positive way — gets lost.

We often do not get voluntary participants. People are forced to come to programs and consequently, it undermines the implementation of other game mechanics. How do we overcome the challenge of voluntary participation?

My response:

• First, there’s an assumption that participants DON’T want to go to training — I think they do. I think their work gets in the way. If they had their druthers, they would volunteer to come, but the system they are a part of (aka, their work environment), prevents/hinders/discourages them from doing so. If it’s choice between learning and utilization, utilization wins (particular to professional services.) Examine the SYSTEM they are a part of.
• Motivation comes from goals. Perhaps if were to get clear on the learner’s goals, we could more clearly map to motivation. If they don’t know their goals, their motivations will be fuzzy, IMHO. If their goal is to figure out their goals, then even that helps.
• The tension in most learning, as was noted in Joe’s post, is that is about the “message” that the organization wants their employees to learn/regurgitate/live. So absolutely, there are training situations where there is a need for compliance and people are forced to go. We look for ways to make those trainings more palatable (like gamification) rather than stating quite clearly, in this GAME of WORK, here are the rules. This is what you must know to survive and thrive. If your goal is to keep your job, guess what, you gotta play by these rules.
• The medium in which this message is given (yes I’m channeling McLuhan, he is Canadian after all) usually kills the motivation (yes, I’m thinking death by powerpoint)
• The challenge is the capture the energy in a forced training situation. Where is the energy? In onboarding (new hires or acquisitions), the energy has to do with anxiety of joining a new organization. The motivation is to understand the lay of the land – expectations, tools, etc. How does one channel the energy into something positive — either connections with each other, with their new organization, or voicing/airing concerns in a safe way. This is not new.

I think with gamification and voluntary participation we are perhaps asking the wrong question. It’s not just about the individual but the system they are a part of. Use gamification, but use it in a way that makes the experience more authentic — bring in randomess and the gaming aesthetic it creates rather than a point system. Allow rules that channel and focus the energy in the room — rules that open up the experience rather than shut it down by someone “telling” you what to do. Create teams that support collaboration rather than competition.

Gamification can be useful with the right framing.

Was I wrong to remain impartial? Should I have taken this opportunity to engage the participants in a dialogue to both question their assumptions and deepen their understanding instead of treating it as fact finding mission? Or would that have come across as too didatic?

I’m reflecting back to a previous engagement that  I had where the interviews I conducted resulted in a mass of confusion, and a failed design – what could I have done differently in that instance? I’m not sure the dialogue would have revealed anything different (or maybe it would have), but what would have shifted is my understanding of the dialogue. If no one could agree on outcomes, how could a better design have helped?  The design should have shifted towards facilitating a dialogue, which is what was really needed.

Coming back to the present — I encouraged the participants to speak their viewpoint, and at the end, added in mine — and offered them resources and other items they could learn from. The scope of my mandate did not allow for much else. But what if I approached the focus group as a learning intervention for both of us? The realm of hermeneutics, or participatory research, you bring the unconscious forward to the conscious and together create a shared meaning – you learn from your participants and allow them to reshape your interpretations or frameworks. One might ask oneself — well, isn’t that what you’re suppose to do, learn from participants? The difference in this approach is consciousness around the creation of a shared meaning.

Taking it one step further into the obvious, focus groups can be instruments of change within an organization – a group of people coming together to express their perspectives and experiences, and then shifting into a group of people committed to making a change.

The challenge is in finding a way to make that shift.

Note: an interesting paper on use of hermeneutics by a Canadian I might add

Courtesy of Micheal Broom, Center for Human Systems

Learning design is all about interventions. We are intervening in existing human systems every time we design or present a course. This is not a radical concept, but the process of becoming clear on my own intention changes how I think about the interventions.

Take for example an onboarding program for new hires. How does thinking about my intentions for onboarding change my design process? What is different now?

Intention: My intention is to align internal resources and messaging to provide a positive onboarding experience for the new hires where they can access and use the tools, resources and people they need to get their jobs done. The new hires should be able to connect previous tools, resources, experiences to their new situations. The people delivering the onboarding experience should understand the messaging and experience they are creating for the interns, as should the people supporting the onboarding.

Connection: All the people involved in onboarding, from designers, to support staff, to facilitators should feel more connected to each other in this process. There is a huge diversity of experience and regional differences,  and we should learn from each other’s differences.

The Intervention: One or two day, in-person event, led by a range of individuals (with differing levels of experience), training them on the expectations, tools, and resources.

Remaining questions:

• What was the impact of the learning intervention? All intervention generate useful information regardless of outcomes.
• Feedback – compare the desired impact to the actual feedback. How sound and current is your data?
• Ego Management – is the intervention based on the needs of the system as well as your own? What are the needs of your client? Don’t let ego issues distract from the goal of building relationships towards their critical mass.

Will this actually change the effectiveness my work as a learning designer? I think at the very least being aware of my ego issues and my intentions has already begun this change process. And thinking about all the human systems at play in this large complex project, of which I am just one piece.

At the same time I started a year-long workshop on the disciplines of Organizational Development, or OD. This has saved my life as it helps me understand the human / organizational systems in my workplace.

I’m restarting this blog to explore this brave new world. And take myself (and maybe you too) for another wild ride. And most of all, I need to start writing again.

Through the Looking Glass is an apt description of what it feels like to enter into a new organization. With every organization you  step through the looking glass, into a world that is defined by its own set of rules. Sometimes the rules make sense, most often they don’t – that is until you have a better understanding of the system, and how it relates to the world around it.

I find myself asking “whose mind is mirrored inside this looking glass?” What minds, or aggregation of minds have created this world? And always, always, the questions — what is the game, what are the rules, who are the players? It’s in my nature to not just try and understand systems, but to try and change them. To find the places where you can shift the game to a new level — the leverage points or “magic key to the secret door.”

My problem is that I get so excited and awed by this new world, that I forget to ask the basic questions about the game. I forget to remain in that place between believing and non-believing, between being a dancer and watching the dancing from a higher ground, between playing the game and playing the rules. This time I’ll try to remember.