Permission to Play: Doing stuff you aren't good at

Rachel Burnham writes:  Last week I was interviewed about my approach to Sketchnoting and how I got started.  As I talked, the questions posed made me look again at my own journey into Sketchnoting and my underlying attitudes to drawing.  I was remembering the messages I picked up at secondary school from our art teacher, which were rather less than encouraging.  One year we had to do a pencil drawing of an object, set by the teacher, each week for homework, which she marked out of 10 and if you received less than 5, you had to do it again.  By the end of the term, I was having to redo 8 pictures every week.

One of my reflections from last week’s interview, is that one of my patterns is to do stuff that I enjoy, even when I am not very good at it.  Sometimes that is about our self-perception of our competence and sometimes it really is the case. Sometimes it is simply that it is new to us.

Last year, I at last had the chance to take a flamenco dance class – it was so much fun.   I enjoyed the sessions, the teacher was encouraging and created a helpful atmosphere for learning – the rest of the group were great – I adored the dancing.  And I was sooo bad at the footwork involved!  To the extent, that I am rather surprised that my left foot is actually connected to the rest of my body – it doesn’t appear to receive many of the messages sent!  But it was a wonderful experience all the same.

I usually go swimming on a Friday night – pre-lockdown, this was my ‘let go of work’ habit for every Friday.  I am definitely not a good swimmer, but I am a happy swimmer – l love swimming in my neighbourhood pool – the way the light glints on the water, the letting go of the week, the focus on breathing, the tired, but relaxed limbs afterwards. 

When I say I am not a good swimmer I am not being modest.  I really only can swim breast stroke and I am too scared to go down the deep end of the pool – I do 80% lengths only.  I hate that feeling of being out of my depth. However, my friend, Liz, challenged me to swim 5 miles over the course of June 2019 and I did it (without once going down the deep end) – it is my only sporting achievement and I am immensely proud of it!

Often we avoid doing things that we aren’t good at or perceive ourselves to be not good at.  In Andy Lancaster’s book ‘Driving Performance Through Learning’ he includes a chapter on ‘mistakes’.  He writes ‘From an early age, we pick up that errors are to be avoided and, if committed, concealed.’ (pg 292)  Doing stuff we aren’t good at can mean making mistakes and not performing at our best.  Our UK schooling system has tended to encourage us to focus on things that we are good at and drop subjects that we find more challenging.  Doing stuff that we aren’t good at (or perceive ourselves to be not good at) can feel risky, uncomfortable, scary – a whole bunch of troubling feelings.  

In a professional setting it can also feel ‘that we should know how to do this already’, that less than perfect competence is unacceptable and we fear of ‘loss of face’ particularly when we are employed for your professional expertise.  I wonder if the more you are used to feeling confident, highly skilled and in control the greater the temptation to not risk putting yourself in a situation where this isn’t case?

I have been pondering these ideas in relation to the field of Learning & Development and the many trainers and other facilitators who have continued to concentrate on face to face delivery – until the challenges of the current pandemic.   And also reflecting on the areas where I personally find it uncomfortable to do stuff I am not good at and as a result avoid doing.

There are many downsides to avoiding things that we aren’t good at: from becoming unpractised at handling these troubling feelings; to losing out on getting better; to being unwilling to risk trying out new ways of working or skills; to just missing out on doing stuff that you could be enjoying.   Of course, there are well-founded arguments for playing to our fundamental strengths, but if we understand this too narrowly; there is a risk that we begin to focus more and more limitingly on what we are good at now – that our territory of confidence becomes increasingly small.  That our capacity to adapt & develop is damaged.

When I am introducing people to Sketchnoting in my workshops, one of the common barriers is the perception held by many people that they can’t draw.    Learning from my experience of helping people to overcome this barrier, here are some of the things that can overcome our reluctance to do stuff we are not good at:

·       Seeing others role model this behaviour – look out for people who do and be inspired by them.

·       Encouragement from others – find a community, network or even just one person who you can practise with.

·       A more realistic approach to perfection – some times we set our goals too high and it becomes easier not to start, rather than not reach them.  When drawing, I often comment that nature is often wonky, so it is fine if our drawing is wonky too.   It may be helpful to think about when perfection is really needed – for example, an architect may need to be able to draw a perfectly straight line, but a Sketchnoter doesn’t.

·       Take time to notice what the experience brings you – whether the pleasure of doing something or any improvements in your skills, however small

·       Permission and time to play – give yourself permission ‘to draw for the bin’.  Carve out time and opportunities when you can mess about, without it feeling high pressure. Permission to play is a great gift given to us all – why not make use of it.

 

End note – Two weeks after completing my 5 mile swim, I at last made it to the end of the pool.  My swimming is still not great, but it is improving all the time.  

 

Rachel Burnham

11/8/2020

I help individuals and organisations to work and learn more effectively, particularly though using the tools of Sketchnoting and the curation of resources.  I make use of Sketchnoting to introduce people to using visuals to aid thinking, working and learning.  I help people to manage for themselves the information they need to stay up-to-date in their professional work.

As a line manager how can you help your team members to learn?

Rachel Burnham writes: Last Friday I was preparing a session for a group of managers I am supporting through a CMI programme and I was thinking about practical things that they could do to support their team members to learn.   Of course, I started to think how could I present this in a Sketchnote.   And then I realised how much better this would be if I asked for contributions from my Personal Learning Network (PLN), so I shared this idea via Twitter. 

I received lots of contributions through the day and then put my Sketchnote together at the end of the working day.   However, the original tweet got retweeted several times and ideas kept coming in throughout the weekend.  I hate to waste a good idea, so I curated these into a Twitter Moment.  

As an aside, Twitter Moments are a great tool for gathering together a few Tweets - they are very easy to use and you can keep adding to them before you publish, so they are very useful for situations when you want to keep a whole Twitter conversation, but perhaps a Wakelet isn't required.  It made me realise I could make more use of Twitter Moments.    

The Sketchnote and Moment have been shared a lot over the course of the last week, so I thought it would be sensible to include them within my blog.  And here they both are – with many, many thanks to all who shared their ideas:

Here is the Twitter Moment.

I will put a larger version of the Sketchnote at the very end of this post. 

Rachel Burnham

11/10/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

Collection of Sketchnotes from eLearning Network event 2018

Rachel Burnham writes: The eLearning Network event held its second event in Manchester on Friday 20^th July 2018.  Here is my collection of Sketchnotes from the event. 

Rachel Burnham

23/7/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

Sketchnotes from CIPD L&D Show 2018

Sketchnotes from CIPD L&D Show 2018

Rachel Burnham writes: Yesterday I visited the Exhibition for this year’s CIPD L&D Show at Olympia in London.  I had some great conversations with people that I know from Twitter, with exhibitors and with people I just got chatting to – Sketchnoting is a great icebreaker!   And it was particularly lovely to get to meet some ‘readers’ of my Sketchnotes, who I hadn’t met before - many thanks to you for introducing yourselves. 

I participated in a number of the free sessions taking place on the exhibition floor.  I had made a careful selection to avoid straight-forward sales pitches and was delighted with my picks there was something interesting, thought-provoking and worthwhile in each of them.   Here are my Sketchnotes from those sessions:

Rachel Burnham

26/4/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

How thinking like a museum can help us to keep up-to-date!

Rachel Burnham writes: Last month I had the exciting opportunity to speak at the second Disrupt HR Manchester.  I was one of 16 speakers each doing an Ignite – one of those tricky presentations made up of 20 slides, each with 15 seconds set to change automatically over a 5 minute period – a particularly challenging format for a session.  I don’t mind speaking in front of a group of people, but I am more of a facilitator, so speaking without hesitation or seeking to involve participants is a bit out of my comfort zone.

I chose to speak about personal curation and created a set of hand-drawn slides to illustrate.  Here is a summary of my presentation:

I am going to focus on ‘How thinking like a museum can help us to keep up-to-date’ and by doing this refresh our professional know-how and as result be more effective in our professional roles.

With the internet, the amount of information that is available to us is increasing exponentially.   There is so much information that we feel we need to be aware of to be up-to-date in our roles – information about our professional field, new information from the world of science, about technology and its application, about our organisation, the sector it is in and the wider economy and world.  It can feel rather over-whelming.

Almost as though we are under a waterfall with all this different information flowing towards us, over us and around us.  How can we manage this information and make good use of this abundance?

The old methods of managing information are no longer effective.  I remember keeping a topic folder to manage information and actually cutting out articles from magazines, journals and newspapers about the subjects that I was particularly working on at the time.  But just as traditional approaches to learning, such as relying only on face to face training programmes, are no long sufficient to enable us to keep pace with change, so these old approaches to managing information are no longer effective.  We need to be always learning.

It is easy enough to lose track of paper resources – I don’t know whether you have ever turned your office upside down in the search for a lost sheet?  How much easier is it to lose track of a great digital resource – you read an informative thought-provoking article one day, but when you want to refer back to it a month later, can you find it? Or you come across a great infographic, but when you try to share it with your colleagues, you don’t have it to hand!  How frustrating!

This is why we need to learn from the approaches developed by museums and art galleries for managing the information and artifacts in their care.  In particular, we can learn about curation.

What do I mean by curation in this context?

It is a bit like a museum putting on a pottery exhibition, and carefully selecting just a few key pots from amongst it’s great collection of pottery, to tell the story of the development of pottery and using labels and the arrangement of the pots to help to tell that story.

We can make use of Harold Jarche’s Seek, Sense and Share model to help us with our practice of personal curation.   If you haven’t come across this model before, I recommend it to you.  Harold can be found on Twitter @hjarche.

The first part of this model is about seeking out relevant information for you.  A key approach is through developing effective networks of individuals and organisations who share interesting information that is relevant to you.  You need to pick out credible and informed people to access the information that you need.   It is helpful not to limit your network to your specific area of work, but to cast your net more widely, to enable you to be informed more broadly.   This network needs to include people who you trust and interact more closely with in order to ‘sense-make’, which is the second part of Harold Jarche’s model and these people will form your Personal Learning Network.

As part of ‘seek’ it also is helpful to make use of technology to automate the bringing of information to you, so that it is as easy as possible for you to see the information that is relevant to you.   For example, you might subscribe to range of blogs and have these delivered to your mobile phone via the tool ‘Feedly’. 

Thirdly, we need to develop really excellent research skills to be able to seek out additional information as and when we need it.  This means being able to go beyond doing simple Google searches.

The second part of Jarche’s model is ‘sense’ or ‘sense-making’ which is all about weighing up the information we see, evaluating it, working out if the information is relevant and worthwhile, but also about drawing out what it means for us in our situation.  So sense-making involves asking questions about the information we are looking at – assessing it’s credibility, asking how current it is, whether it is accurate, what the source of the information is and assessing whether there is a bias in the information from that source.  This process often leads to filtering out information that doesn’t meet our needs or our standards of high quality.  

We also need to consider how to store any information or resources we discover, so that we can easily get our hands on it again.  It makes sense to do this digitally, so that we can access it at work or when we are on the move.   This involves categorising information and labelling it, so that it is easily discoverable.  There are a number of digital tools that can be used to do this – an example is Evernote.

Perhaps the most important part of ‘sense-making’ is digesting the information we have found and relating it to our own context.  This sense-making can take place through reflection individually, but also through engagement with other people and this can be where your Personal Learning Network really comes into its own.   You may also be drawing information from different sources together and seeing patterns, connections, differences and relationships between these pieces to create new insights.

The final part of this three stage model is ‘share’.   Having found useful resources and having made sense of information, identifying who would it be useful to share this with and how would be helpful to share this material.   You may want to share with your immediate colleagues, groups of employees you work with, other stakeholders or peers.  It is worth thinking through what method of sharing would work best for a particular audience and how you can put the information or resource into context for that audience.   By making careful choices of what you share and when and how and the additional information you add, you can ensure that you add value to what you share. 

To be effective at curation, it is worth considering your mindset – it helps to be curious, to consider what your ‘intent or purpose’ is in curating and to recognise that you don’t need to know everything about a subject area and instead can focus on knowing who does have expertise in that area and where information can be found.

To be effective at curation, it also helps to make use of the digital tools to make your task simpler.   There are many different digital tools that can be used to support each of the aspects of ‘Seek - sense - share’ and I have mentioned just a couple of those available earlier in this piece.   These can be used alongside the skills of networking, researching, filtering, collaborating for greatest effectiveness.

I also think that habits can play a part in effective curation - for example, I have developed the practice of always writing notes about any resource I look at and setting out its relevance, what I think of it and its source and date, before I store it.  These notes are not extensive - simple labels to help me manage the information.   Other habits that can be helpful could be when you set aside time for reading or listening to podcasts, or regular patterns for sharing material that you have come across eg a weekly round-up for colleagues.    

‘Personal curation’ is as it suggests about a personal approach.  What works for one person, won’t necessarily work for someone else.  The precise combination of mindset, skills, digital tools and habits that work will be different for each individual.  We need to create our own approach.

We can do this by reviewing what we are already doing to manage the information we need to be effective in our work.  What amongst the things we are doing to seek, sense and share is going well, what is not working so well?  We can learn from the experience of other people and pick up tips and ideas from them.  We can also experiment and try out new approaches ourselves, particularly with using digital tools to automate some of these steps.   It is an ongoing process to refine our approach and make it work for us, so that the abundance of information available to us, isn’t a burden, but a resource for our effectiveness.

So, here is my challenge to you – how might thinking like a museum help you to keep up-to-date?

And here is the video of my Ignite if you would like to watch it! 

Rachel Burnham

10/4/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

The Launch of PrintCity, MMU

Rachel Burnham writes: I had the opportunity last week to participate in the launch event for PrintCity, which is a part of Manchester Metropolitan University.  PrintCity is a new digital training centre for 3D printing and additive manufacturing, which is based within the university and builds on their previous work in this field. PrintCity can be contacted on Twitter @PrintCityMMU and the team is led by Professor Craig Banks.

3D Printing enables the creation of individual objects from a wide range of differing materials which can be used in prototyping or to create one off pieces such as individualised prosthetics or art-pieces.   It was explained to me, that ‘additive’ manufacturing is so called because it differs from traditional manufacturing processes which have been based on essentially removing materials (the words chipping, grinding and engraving spring to mind), whereas ‘additive’ manufacturing is based on gradually building up materials into the shape required.  There are a number of different ways of doing this.  Additive manufacturing allows for much greater precision allowing finer pieces to be created; makes it possible to produce unique pieces for a smaller initial outlay; and reduces waste.   An example of the latter, is that this process is being used to create the extremely heavy duty connectors required for vehicles in the American military.  These were previously  made from huge blocks of specialised metal, which then had to be whittled down to create the links, involving a massive amount of waste, whereas this way they can be built up from scratch and  then polished off, leading to much less waste.

The event involved a good combination of talks explaining what PrintCity does and setting out the potential for the use of 3D printing, input from Siemans and other partners on how this sort of change is transforming engineering and manufacturing processes, plus opportunity to look around the facilities at PrintCity and see many examples of 3D printing.  These examples included lots of different engineering parts made from various materials, but also fashion items, prosthetics, furniture and sculpture. 

It was great to hear about the many uses of this technology.  It is already being used in fields such as dentistry and medicine to create models to prepare surgeons for surgery, enabling them to ‘see’ in advance and prepare more fully for difficult surgical procedures and also to create individual prosthetics and other items.  We were told how the team at PrintCity were approached by the father of a young girl who was missing part of one of her arms and how a multi-disciplinary team worked together to create a prosthetic just for her, but this learning has then been applied for the benefit of other children.  

This technology can enable businesses to create prototypes of new equipment and products far faster and more cheaply than was previously possible, supporting innovation.   One particular advantage of this is that it makes it possible for smaller companies to engage in R&D and test things out.  One of the other participants in the event told me about how advantageous this is by comparison with the previous situation where a small company might easily spend a substantial sum (£40,000 was the amount mentioned) on the development of a prototype only for it not to work and in his experience this had led to the closure of companies. Whereas using 3D printing you could prototype for much smaller amounts and therefore adjust and try again if the first attempt was unsuccessful.   PrintCity are keen to collaborate with local businesses in this sort of way.

I was fascinated by the very wide range of skills that Alan Norbury of Siemans identified engineers as needing today.  This included use of big data, cyber security, AR and VR, robotics, cloud, gamification, design of apps and many, many others. 

One of the things that most excited me, was hearing about the very wide range of professional disciplines that are making use of this technology at PrintCity and are taking part in their new MSc in Industrial Digitalisation.  As you would expect the engineers are using it, but so are people from medicine, dentistry, fashion, art and so on.   There are a very wide range of applications from these different sources from custom-made buttons, through to lampshades created from sounds!  Apparently the fashion students are particularly good at coming up with new uses.

Some familiar themes to those of us in L&D were mentioned too, but in relation to manufacturing – in particular the use of agile design and manufacturing processes and the increasing importance of personalisation of manufacturing products as a way to add value.   Alan Norbury from Siemans talked about how adding value to products through the increasing customisation of products, coupled with agile manufacturing meant that increased productivity was attainable, without job losses.  

I would love a visit to PrintCity to be included in the fringe activities available around this year’s CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition – I think we in HR and L&D would have much to learn and be inspired by from this kind of collaboration.

Rachel Burnham

13/3/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and perform more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

   

The Smartphone as Swiss Army Knife

Rachel Burnham writes: I found myself looking at my Smartphone last Thursday afternoon and thinking about all the different ways I use it to support my own learning.  As I tend to, I picked up a pen and started to sketch a few of these out – then thought how interesting it would be to hear from other people in my network about how they use their smartphones. 

This is the tweet I shared:

Thank you to all who responded and contributed over the next few days.  I received lots of great suggestions – some I had thought of and lots of additional ones too, plus different perspectives, which is just what I had hoped for.

Many people shared with me the different ways that they used their phone to enable learning – some mentioned listening to podcasts, or using Audible to listen to audio books.  Others mentioned reading articles and blogs and also saving these articles or other resources and making use of tools such as Evernote or Pocket, so that you can return to them.   Many people mentioned watching short videos and some mentioned using screen capture and annotation or specialist apps such as that provided by @Coach’sEye.

For a couple of people a key factor was being able to ‘learn on the go’ and that their smartphone enabled this.  For example, @LindaRuthMcGee shared that she had completed several MOOCs using her smartphone and that its convenience had been crucial to this. 

A couple of people mentioned the importance of access to a search engine, Google, as a vital resource for them via their smartphone.   This led to some discussion about whether the information gathered in this way was learning, or just data.  We had different views on this. Richard Martin @indalogensis homed in on the fact that I had asked about Smartphone use to enable learning and reminded me that our phone is just a tool.  I think the learning comes with how we respond to the stimulus from our phones, whether a tweet, a podcast or a search that we do – does it lead to reflection, insight, action?  So how we use our phones may lead to learning or not. 

You can link this to Harold Jarche’s ‘Seek, Sense, Share’ model of Personal Knowledge Mastery.  Lots of us immediately focused on the ‘Seek’ part of this model in reporting on how we use our phones. 

But people also mentioned using their phones to capture notes, ideas and plan actions eg through use of Trello. The sense-making aspect of Jarche’s model. And some also mentioned sharing, particularly through their networks.

And of course, asking this question on Twitter meant that lots of people mentioned using their phone for conversations with their network – ‘to expand my network’, ‘to learn via my Twitter feed’ and twitter chats.  People also mentioned other networks and groups such as ‘WhatsApp groups’. I particularly liked the breadth of Helen Blunden’s response:

One additional element, that is important for me is that my smartphone helps me to easily collaborate with others and this has been a significant source of learning for me in recent years – one example being my collaboration with @niallgavinuk to explore the use of VR and AR in learning – here is a link to our most recentcuration of resources. 

Taruna Goel @write2tg summed it up for me ‘A smart phone helps me to stay connected and engage in continuous, self-directed learning.’

Reflections

We know that it is really important for us in L&D to be continuously developing our skills and insights, so one step in this direction would be to make sure we are making full use of our smartphone in doing this.   I know that this exercise, has given me a couple of ideas for how I can make even better use of my phone.  

It could be a useful exercise for an L&D team meeting to review and share ideas about how you and your colleagues are using your phone to enable learning.

And this could also be the basis for a useful short session or online conversation with employees – encouraging them to share tips and ideas for using their own phones to support their learning. 

And here is what you have been waiting for, my sketchnote:

Rachel Burnham

26/2/18

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals update and refresh their skills.  I do this through: writing & design commissions; facilitating learning to update knowhow, 1:1 and bespoke ‘train the trainer’ programmes; and the use of Sketchnoting to facilitate learning.