Companies such as Foursquare, Stack Overflow, and ThredUP reward customers with virtual merit badges. Pete Sucheski Courtesy Company It seems some people will do just about anything to earn a trophy, even an imaginary one. In April, Parker Liautaud, a 15-year-old from England, became the first to earn the Last Degree badge when he used Foursquare from the North Pole.
Excellent series of very short (1.5 minutes or less) how-to videos on using PowerPoint presentations by Dave Yewman, published in July 2008 but still relevant today.
A Slideshare by Etienne Garbugli on using time effectively that went viral to get 1 million views since being uploaded in March 2013.
Very effective ideas; maybe we could use it as an experimental exercise--"find three ideas to test doing in the next week; come back and tell us how it went"
Video on YouTube, posted May 9, 2013.
"Style and aesthetics cannot rescue failed content."
"Google Maps are visualization" helping people do something.
"History of visualizing data is history of science"
Not an aerie-faerie
"Three things to inform your design--what you have to say and communicate, reader is not you and they will come with their own bias and assumptions, and data itself and what it has to say."
Can communicate a lot of information very quickly--emotional impact, react to aesthetics of piece, presenting information in visual format is fastest way for them to engage with information."
"Successful infographic tells a story.
"Hero is one key element of piece." "Take complicated data and convert to something simple. Hours to seconds..."
"Data are measurements of something"
"Revelation--show us something we haven't seen before"
Post by Dianne Harman, Huff Post, June 6, 2013 on reinvention. Like this conclusion:
Every time you reinvent yourself, you're forced to learn something new. And a mind that's engaged in learning is a young mind. So what's your reinvention story?
In keeping with our mission to find icons or symbols to convey the categories of our shop, this is a beautiful list and suggests that maybe we could combine some brightly colored fun shapes for our shop
blog by Harold Jarche on the Connected Workplace, 4.15.2013
Excerpts:
"Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done."
..."Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization."
..."Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks."
..."Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust."
a quick video to explain what clouds are for nonprofits; concepts are simple and appropriate for individuals to understand. By NPowerPA, a tech nonprofit that helps other nonprofits with their computer technology needs
Blog post by Chris Collison, , on why organizations don't value implementing in a more systematic way the documented learning.
"In my experience, many organisations sometimes treat lessons learned like they are an end in themselves - as though the value has to remain in the document - rather than where possible leading to actions which embody the learning. These actions might include updating a process, policy, standard or system has been updated to incorporate the learning, which removes the need to promote the lessons or recommendations to future teams.
So why do some organisations settle for a pile of lessons rather than a set of improvements?
Some possibilities:
It's much easier to write a document than see a change through to completion.
It's too difficult to find the owner of the process which needs changing.
I'm measured on how many lessons our project captures.
We have invested in customizing SharePoint to capture lessons learned documents, and need to show that we're using it.
Although I wrote the recommendation, I'm not 100% confident that we should change the process for everyone."
blog post by Chris Collison, 1.31.13, on how we have problems asking for help because it betrays our ignorance or incompetence.
Excerpt:
Of course, it's not exclusively a male problem, but it does seem to be the case that men suffer from this syndrome more than women. It's hard to ask for help.
We have all had times when we have that nagging sense that "there might be a better way to do this", or "perhaps someone else has already figured this one out". What stops us from asking around for solutions and ideas for improvement? Sometimes it's a sense that we're supposed to know the answers.
Why would I want to show everyone else that I'm incompetent?
That doesn't seem like a route to promotion. However, once I've solved my problem, I'll be happy to share my solution.
The truth is, the biggest challenge to organisations who want to get more from what they know, isn't that they have a knowledge sharing problem. It's that they have an asking problem.
Blog post by Chris Collison on 2.26.13, that discusses reciprocity in fostering a learning atmosphere and adoption of best practice in an organization.
Excerpt:
"Reciprocity is an important principle for knowledge management, and one which underpins the idea of Offers and Requests.
Offers and Requests was a simple approach, introduced to make it easier for Operations Engineers at BP to ask for help, and to share good practice with their peers. The idea was for each business unit to self-assess their level of operational excellence using a maturity model, and identify their relative strengths and weaknesses. In order to overcome barriers like "tall poppy syndrome", or a reluctance to ask for help ("real men don't ask directions"), a process was put in place whereby every business unit would be asked to offer three areas which they felt proud of, and three areas which they wanted help with. The resulting marketplace for matching offers and requests was successful because:
i) The principle of offering a strength at the same time as requesting help was non-threatening and reciprocal - it was implicitly fair.
ii) The fact that every business unit was making their offers and requests at the same time meant that it felt like a balanced and safe process."