Want to understand your audience’s value system?

Here’s a game I created that will quickly provide you with an insight into what your audience value most - resources, bottom line, successful projects, or personal agenda.

Divide the audience into 4 groups (or more depending on number of audience) then give these instructions.

Instructions:
* Within your groups, pull one (1) item from your wallet that you think identifies you (Family Photos? Credit cards? Euros? Keys? Coins? Jewelry…. ?? Be creative in your choice)
* Within your groups, one at a time – tell the group why you’ve identified with this item
NOTE: Someone in the group needs to capture this information
You have 10 minutes to complete this part of the exercise

[after 10 minutes]
For the next 3 minutes, determine if there are similarities in the statements of the members of each group. Mark what’s similar and what’s not.

[after 3 minutes]
Hand this list to the group next to you.
For the next 3 minutes, determine if there are similarities between the statements you just handed to the group next to you and the one you just received

[after 3 minutes]
Instructor Instructions: Each group presents what their findings are. Note that the group presenting will be information that they’ve captured from another group, not their own at this point. Once all teams presented, go to debrief.

Debrief:
1. What did we learn from this exercise?
2. How can these findings relate to your connection with the attendees in this conference [or meeting, session, class, etc]?
3. How can we use what we’ve learned from this exercise that will assist us at work [or school, team, etc]?

[as always, the contents of this site can be reproduced but not for commercial purposes and only if with link back to this site, thanks]

What other benefits do you see from this exercise? Post your comments here

I’ll be attending the Mesh Conference 2007 in Toronto next week, May 30-31. I’ll be blogging live from there as well as twittering away. I have to setup my twitter on my phone and then will be typing to my heart’s content though will be limited by how much my fingers can handle. If you’re at the conference or in the area, let me know and we can connect live.

Mesh keynote discussions speakers are: Public Relations guru Richard Edelman, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Craig’s List’s Jim Buckmaster, GiveMeaning.com’s Tom Williams, Canadian Entrepreneur and Angel Investor Austin Hill .

Then there’s also Jennifer Evans, Mary Hodder, Jian Ghomeshi,Kate Trgovac, Amber MacArthur, Andrew Coyne, Loren Feldman,Leesa Barnes, Mark Relph, Jennifer Corriero, John Jantsch, Mark Dowds, Jeff Howe, Simon Pulsifer, Nora Young, McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves, Rachel Sklar, Garth Turner, Michael Masnick, Christine Herron, Scott Feschuk, Paul Kedrosky, Nancy Peterson, Jonathan Dube, Scott Brooks, Philip de Vellis, Leila Boujnane, Rick Segal, David Jones, Michael Sikorsky, Jordan Banks, Paul Sullivan, Steve Herrmann, Will Pate, Ted Murphy, Cynthia Brumfield, Jeremy Wright, Ethan Kaplan, Albert Lai, Michael O’Connor Clarke, Mark Federman, Lionel Menchaca, Rachel Clarke, Kimia Ghomeshi and more…

Where’s Chris Pirillo? Where’s Scoble? Reading Eric Eggertson’s posting, I think Scoble is he busy twittering.

After reading Kitta’s posting on the use of “Add Me” [as in "link me to your social network"] in F2F conversation I wanted to test its commonplaceness in conversations with my 15 yo niece. I asked how she’d like to address me in emails: UR, Uncle R, or Uncle Robin. I had a purpose to the question:

~ Was she imbibing the text/twitter/shortened/buzz word language? Much like Kitta’s “Add Me” posting?
~ Or has she engaged in classic Valley-speak, the one that’s ’sorta-’kinda-you’know-oh What-Ever… ? A semblace of regional integration, maybe?
~ Or some other incarnation of the constantly changing vernacular? And what would that be?

I wanted to know how her generation is learning a language while they’re encased in it. Learning by doing, eh? (in this case by kinesthetics too as they’ve been texting as much as they’re verbalizing from my observation) Although I couldn’t text-type ala my colleagues in Asia (ok that was a blanket generalization… how about - like my niece) I do know how to read text though. Does that make me e-texting disabled? (in which case, where’s my blue e-parking space?) Is this a view to some forthcoming change into international commerce’s lingua franca?

With fodder for linguistic researchers, this becomes more prominent for corporate communicators now. We’ve all learned how its imperative to be understood by our multi-generational audience but we have to constantly learn to balance amongst the various generations lest you may end up being considered too traditional, too conservative, too boring. Balance that with trying too hard and not hip enough.

My niece’s response was “UR” sounds like “Your”, “Uncle R” sounds like a gangster name, so I’m using “Uncle Robin.” Guess that answers my question.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we don’t have war?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we don’t have unnecessary shootings?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we don’t pretend we know someone and make judgments about the person after a first meeting?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we took the time to really learn about life, love, and passion?
Wouldn’t it be nice to realize that one can never have too many friends?
Wouldn’t it be nice to bridge the gap between generations?
Wouldn’t it be nice to get our head out of underneath all that sand of constant change?
Wouldn’t it be nice to pay quality teachers the rock star rates they deserve?
Wouldn’t it be nice to constantly engage high performing stakeholders and provide them the support they really need?
Wouldn’t it be nice to just listen?
Wouldn’t it be nice to just be yourself?

What are your “wouldn’t it be nice” statements?

I can see you! I can see why you did what you did. I can see what is wrong with this process. I can see ….

We’ve been trained to identify visual individuals as saying “I can see” and auditory saying “I can hear…” when it comes to learning styles. Some may also be saying “..but I would rather see and hear” or “…be kinesthetic and listen” or “…use all my learning styles” or “…I switch back and forth amongst all learning styles” or even “…I don’t want to be pigeon-holed into one type.”

You’re not alone. You are in the company of many visual-spatial learners (VSL) or one having a split-attention. Trained Instructional Designers, especially those who have seen the ibstpi competencies, know to address to these various learning styles to ensure the desired knowledge transfer. Like most categorizations, we lean towards one or two and have gradiations of dependency amongst the rest; thus making it a holistic approach rather than falling under stuccato-like one-categorization options.

Now what is new here? What happens to your organisation or corporate training exercises when an emerging Web 2.0 tool prevails? The forerunners would most likely want to integrate it right? Examples would be Twitter, Jott, Jaiku, Odeo, flickr, smugmug, facebook, doodle, and hundreds more. The immediate questions that come to mind would be: (a) If organisations are integrating or thinking of integrating these tools with their existing processes, how are they doing it? (b) What were their challenges? (c) How do they decide which of the many similar products would be appropriate for their organisation? (d) Why would they want to do this in the first place? and most importantly, (e) How is this even related to VSL?

We could have a day of consulting session in dealing with questions (a) to (d) and if you search the net or look at Amazon, you’d find many responses to these questions so for now I will jump to question (e). Organisations have various audiences with varied learning styles. In my two decades in the training field, I’ve never seen a classroom full of just one learning style - all auditory, all visual, all kinesthetic. In fact its the opposite that I’ve seen, learner styles come in all forms and variations AND the styles shift depending on the topic and the classroom landscape. Since learning happens everywhere more so outside the classroom, organisations have to be particularly aware of how they are integrating Web 2.0 tools to their processes.

Here are my top three questions that you’d need to figure out before you start adding new technologies to your organisational processes as it relates to learning styles:

1. Have you polled how your audience learns? Although you can’t do this for every audience you can get a sampling that would reflect user’s learning styles. Would an auditory learner be happy with flickr? Would a visual learner be happy with Odeo? For internal employees, PAEI is a good free online program that provides not just learning styles but learning philosophies.

2. Are all your communication to all audiences addresses all types of learning styles and any ancillary needs of these learning styles? I was working with a Fortune 100 organisation and their website was great but it does not address some of their baby boomer audience’s need to have larger fonts. So although learning styles may have been addressed, the eyesight issue was not. That particular type of audience had to know how to change their own font sizes from their browsers rather than clicking a button from the website itself.

3. Would an alternate option like a mashup be the more appropriate Web 2.0 tool to have an integrated experience rather than one style and then another in sequence?

What other questions that you’ve asked before you’ve integrated Web 2.0 tools in a corporate learning environment?

… not the bugs but another kind of critters. These are critical thinking creatures in your organisation. Critters, as Critical Management Systems (CMS) specialists fondly call themselves, seek to expose, understand, and change the underlying causes of a phenomenon—a training organisation’s processes, an organisational orientation programme, a performance metric scale, standards and quality measurements, etc. If you were unaware of what they were doing…

You may think of them as troublemakers trying to rattle the cages you’ve neatly placed and ensured compliance from everyone. You may think of them as naysayers who would not let go of their beliefs.You may be disconcerted with their efforts thinking that they are undermining your authority.You may think they should be fired… ergo silenced … and hope that none other is infected by their viral thoughts and water cooler speeches.

The next time you hear someone say something that sounds out of the ordinary, maybe its time to practice differentiating between someone’s need to complicate or conciliate.

Virginia Tech continues to be the top search keywords at Technorati today. With how the university treated the two sets of killings, it brings to light contingency plan questions in the corporate arena.

Five questions that you would need to think about ~
1. Are you prepared for anyone (employee, former employees, vendors, partners, clients…) going postal?
2. Are you prepared to deal with managing support for whomever gets affected if a similar event happens in the workplace?
3. Do you have a succession plan in place?
4. Are your employees properly oriented in evacuation and lock down procedures?
5. Are you, as a leader, mentally and emotionally prepared to handle all of this?

Question for you: What additional questions that need to be addressed?

You’d think upon looking at this photo that I’d say something less than a G-rated post. Well not this time. I’ve initially categorized this as one of my “mom conversations” because most, if not all, moms, would most likely say something with regard to protection to their kids…but I have another thought on this. It’s about leadership and training protection.

Protection comes in a variety of formats from this photo: (1) from oncoming projectiles, (2) from falling debris, and (3) from uneven surfaces.

In leadership, if I try the analogy, it would be (1) copyright protection from oncoming potential lawsuits or protection by having a clear set of work processes to prevent oncoming HR challenges, (2) protection from falling stock prices and (3) protection from the constantly changing landscape.

In trainnig, if I continue the analogy thread, it would be (1) preparation to protect you from oncoming learner queries that you may not known off hand (2) preparing the classroom environment to protect you from equipment failing or malfunctioning (3) protect yourself from courseware content shifts that you may or may not be sure of delivering.

Protection is important. It’s proactive. It’s purposeful preparation. Might save you loads of capital and resources or like the photo, your life.

So its your turn to share - What other three protection you can think of that you do in your industry?

Brainstorming is a great opportunity to build new knowledge. An online brainstorming program provides a medium for the world to participate in development of this new knowledge. So I posted a question - How do you engage lifelong creative and innovative learners?

In engaging learners to have a passion for continuous creative and innovative learning, I find Thales’ Know thyself as a good starting point. Three activities I ask individuals to complete prior to starting a programme that incorporates continuous C&I learning relate to personality, learning style, and various quotients.

1. Do you know your personality style? Have you taken a Myer’s Briggs test before or something similar? Following Chris Lott and D’Arcy Norman, an example looks like this:

What’s Your Personality Type?

2. Do you know your learning style? One online example from North Carolina State University is here. Are you Active or Reflective? Sensing or Intuitive? Visual or Verbal? Sequential or Global? Although these may reflect your most natural way of learning, we are always able to learn using other modalities so long as we are attuned to the process.

3. Do you know your Qs? EQ, IQ, CQ…? Sample IQ here or Mensa’s workout here . Information on CQ here and Emotional Intelligence Quotient here.

Why do you need to know yourself first before you have a programme of continuous learning? So that the programme fits your organisation’s make up. Each organisation is unique and using a programme because its de rigeur is not the most appropriate approach.

Question for you then is this:
1. Do you have a continuous learning programme in place at work?
2. What were the processes prior-during-after the programme was implemented? What were the processes for the implementors and the rest of the employees affected?
3. What improvements can you incorporate so that this programme sticks?Post your thoughts here.

My blog entries are at http://blog.robinyap.com