I’ve written a few blog posts about being a modern learning leader (links at the end).

This one is some reflections on what a modern learning leader is, which has been prompted by attending the Modern Learning Leader workshop, hosted by Sukh Pabial.

Humour – your superpower?

The two day workshop was a lot of collaboration, sharing and supporting each other. It actually got quite deep, personal and meaningful. An excellent balance for this was humour, so there were lots of laughs too.

This started well in the day, as you can see these tweets:

Topics

There were a range of topics that the cohort looked at in webinars ahead of the workshop. What we remembered were added to post-it notes and formed a great place to look back and prompt conversations over the two day workshop.

The discussions

What we covered and how we covered was fascinating. We started with what Sukh referred to as a “contracting piece” on how we wanted to work during the day. This wasn’t a simple “rules for how we communicate”, but was actually a conversation over an hour, relating to some of the things we read in the books as part of the programme, about how we can help each other.

As Sukh commented, this was two days and we had the time do this, in other programmes that might not be appropriate. We also had a very small group of four people, all experienced professionals.

The conversations were broad and wide-ranging, sometimes focusing on the topics from the knowledge webinars, sometimes on questions we had where we wanted to understand or learn more knowledge either from Sukh or each other in our respective specialist areas and with our experiences.

Above shows one of the questions I offered to other people to think about when discussing with their stakeholders about learning solutions.

Another powerful question that came up at the end of day two was “is there actually a problem?” and from that things like “who is it a problem for?” and more.

Reflection

Sukh built reflection into the programme, including this flip chart as a starting prompt for us:

People thought and made their notes in their own way. I did mine as a blog – a pretty raw one at that. I gave myself the liberty not to read it back nor worry too much about the technical issues of blogging. You can read it here if you want.

This is a Periscope live video broadcast reviewing the end of day one:

Go wild

On day two we began with another reflection piece, utilising the technique of wild writing.

This was a great technique, where you just keep writing without stopping, to see what comes out. Not worrying about spelling, grammar or even making sense. It’s useful to get out what’s in your head, sometimes without even realising what you knew or where thinking.

Green space

Part of the programme was to work on some projects that were top of mind for us, different for each person.

Michael and I work together at Lightbulb Moment, so we worked together on this. We started with one project, that was a specific part of the business we are building and working on. After working through some discomfort, I soon realised our project should be something different and that focusing our discussion elsewhere was, actually, more or less what we had done most of the time.

A Periscope live video broadcast of Michael and I discussing our thoughts:

Kevin has his own revelations, including see some things in the space where we are which resonated with him:

At the end of the day, after more in-depth discussions around what we were working on, we highlighted what we had got out of such an in-depth discursive programme:

And a group Persicope rounding it up:

Sukh ran a light-touch programme in terms of his design and facilitation, which gave us the room to use the time as was right for all of us.

The things I’m taking away for Lightbulb Moment is more focus on my own self-development, and that of anyone associated with the business, and time for creative thinking and reflection.

Let’s see how it goes!

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