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.
