Building in time to process

At SOBCon, we work together to build our businesses. Photo by Elja Daae. 

Just back from one of my favorite annual events (SOBCon), and I'm trying to make sure I don't just stuff my notes in a folder and forget about them. I'm planning some time today to think and process.

• I held a phone call with a friend who happened to be attending a major conference of his own. We shared our takeaways and thoughts as he was driving home and I was waiting to head to the airport. 
• I did some processing and thinking on the plane. I copied notes into the paper handbook from the conference. I copied ideas and actions into my personal notebook. Why copy over by hand? Because that act of re-writing gave me a chance to re-think and refine. 
• Today I'll take those goals and action ideas and turn them into specific things to do and put them into my system. I'll add some things to items to do this week, and others on the waiting list. 

One new attendee said she knew she had a three hour drive home, and she couldn't do much work there. Then once she's home, it's right back into all the regular things that need done.

One person who has attended several times said he usually takes five or six weeks before he digests the lessons from the event. He doesn't set aside special time for it.

My friend that I called said he had set aside special time on the morning after the conference and before his drive home to do his review. BUT the night before, he sat down and made goals and a plan for what he would be thinking about. If he hadn't, he said, he knew he'd waste that time on unfocused activity.

When I mentioned this need to Kyle Golding, he said if you built time to review and process into an event, people would just use the "extra" time to review and check their phones, social media, text, basically wasting it.

Meeting organizer Liz Strauss said people would skip review time and do their own thing. They would see it as "non-content time" and therefore less valuable.

SO.....
I'm thinking there is some way to make this work.

• Build a 1.5 hour time slot into the very end of your event. 
• Label it as something people will value. (The most effective label would depend on the group.)
• Have a facilitator lead a short (15 minute?) session to help people set their goals for the review. 
• Let people self-organize into small groups or work on their own. 
• Turn off the conference wifi. (That's just mean, but you know it reduces temptation. And if people really need online, most can use their phones. Or make a separate zone or room with wifi available.) 

I'd love to hear about any events that plan for time to plan your "re-entry." 

Row all the way in

The Olympics were on the tv in a local restaurant. I caught a few of the rowing heats. The leaders in each heat pulled hard all the way to the finish. But those near the back, realizing they were beaten, would stop rowing and coast across the line.

Maybe that makes sense from a "conserve energy and do better next round" perspective.

But if I make it to the equivalent of the Olympics, I hope I put everything I've got into it each and every chance I get, or as close as I can make myself get to that ideal.

If you make it to the Olympics, row all the way in.

Facilitated video as learning

I've been thinking about completely changing the learning processes that I get involved in, especially speaking and conferences. It started with a tweet that farmers could learn best on farm study tours, rather than conferences. So "tours as conferences" has been running around in my head.

Now I have this other idea, inspired by the post "Where YouTube Meets the Farm" By David Bornstein in the New York Times blogs.  The story profiles Rikin Gandhi, "a young American-born software engineer" and his efforts to change farm learning in rural India.

The best way to teach farmers to change their practices, it turns out, isn't to have the ag extension guy come around and tell them. It's to show short videos, featuring local farmers like them, demonstrating and discussing the practice, then show them with a facilitator who creates an active discussion. The controlled field trial in India showed this lead to much more adoption of the practices and it cost less money to accomplish. Jack Gibbons of Stanford was credited with the original teaching model, Tutored Video Instruction.

I think this holds some lessons we could apply in a much wider range of learning settings: conferences, workshops, churches, schools, tours, special events.

Keys:
1. Short videos (8 to 10 minutes)
2. Featuring "people like me"
3. From the field
4. Showing and explaining practices
5. Including mistakes
6. Shown in small local groups
7. Facilitating active discussion

1. Short videos
Who needs another hour long lecture? I don't. You don't. 8 to 10 minutes makes it possible to give enough detail, but not put everyone to sleep.

2. Featuring "people like me"
The project in India found that if they showed a farmer who looked too prosperous, the audience would quit listening. If they used only men, the women wouldn't listen. If the demonstration is given by someone with an accent that clearly isn't local, the audience discounted what they said. They listened and learned best with someone very much like them.
Imagine going to a local business, and shooting your video with the owner or manager, someone the business people in your audience can clearly relate to.
Rather than centrally-produced videos being shown all over, it's local videos shown across a small region. How local is local in this case? Well, I think it would depend on your subject. The goal is to get someone people in the audience can completely relate to. I'll listen more to another rural business owner than I will to a "big city" business owner any day. I'll listen to a small business person before a big corporate manager. The more local, the better seems to be the bottom line.

3. From the field
4. Showing and explaining practices 

Not another talking head video. Just a farmer in the field showing and telling from the real world. 

For your business video, let's get that owner or manager in the back room to talk about inventory management.
Throw away the PowerPoint slides. Just show me how it works!

5. Including mistakes
I don't mean mistakes in filming, I mean having the person demonstrating discuss mistakes or problems they encountered. This was included in the project in India, and it makes sense for all kinds of subjects. Tell people the pitfalls to avoid.

6. Shown in small local groups
7. Facilitating active discussion 
Stop making people come together in one central location to get the latest knowledge from on high. In India, a local person is trained to act as facilitator. "Typically, the group watches once through, then a second time, with the facilitator stopping and starting, reiterating concepts, soliciting questions, asking people to share experiences, announcing follow-up discussions."

Random Notes
What if one of the farmers forgot a detail or wants to review the video before trying out the practice? In India, they are planning to try making audio from the videos available by phone. (Many locals who have no electricity still have a cell phone.) In the U.S., we have the luxury of simply making the videos themselves available.

The technology is here. Your cell phone shoots better video than the first video camera I owned. Video setups today can be simple and inexpensive. So there is no excuse for not making a local video.

In some cases, the farmer in the video was assisted by an expert.

And showing videos on site today is no tougher than bringing and iPad or a pico projector.

What if we combined the study tour and the facilitated video? 

Your invitation

I was just catching up with a friend today.

"Why weren't you at the big conference? It wasn't far for you to travel," I asked.

"Nobody invited me," he said.

We all feel like that, don't we? We want someone to invite us, to make us feel welcome, feel special. People like to be asked. I can think of a couple of ways I've let this feeling stop me from something good.

Lesson One. Invite them all, one by one. 
If you run an event, any event, remember that you need to personally invite everyone you can think of. You have to ask them, one by one. Maybe they'll come anyway, but people like to be asked.

Lesson Two. Don't wait for your invitation. 
If you haven't been personally invited, stop waiting. Invite yourself. Yes, it's normal to want to be invited, but that's a poor reason to miss anything.

Take this as your invitation.

Why do we spend for status?

In a small town, we know your family, and we know what you've done for the community over the past 20 years or so. We can judge your status based on your contributions.

In a big city, you don't know all that. You have to make your judgment of people based on more shallow indicators of status. If you show the outer markers of wealth, then surely you have also made important contributions to the community.

I think that is where spending for status comes from: the lack of context about status based on your own worth, replacing it with status items.

Of course, it may have come from big cities, but spending for status is plenty prevalent in small towns, too. And I think that is because of our much better communication tools. Now rural people tend to judge themselves against not just locals but also urban friends.

What difference does this make? Probably none at all. Just thinking.