Learning & Development Roundtable – Drum Cafe Style
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication, Diversity & culture
For about a year & a half now I’ve been organizing a monthly learning & development roundtable in Nairobi. (Check out the link for a list of our workshop topics & resources.) We are an eclectic group from NGO’s, corporate companies & the UN. Each month we have a different speaker. This month we were fortunate to have Maina Joseph & his group from the Drum Cafe.
(Are you in Nairobi & interested in finding out more about attending future roundtable meetings? Simply email me – laragan at rpsinc.ca.)
Check out our efforts in the short video below.
There’s lots to be learned from the rhythm of the drums. Here are some of the debriefing questions we covered after the fun of drumming:
1. Drums speak a language all of their own. What are the parallels when we’re speaking with someone of a different language than our own? And when we’re speaking with someone who technically speaks the same language but we’re using the same language differently?
2. Maina & Antony prepared the drums by heating them with fire. Antony prepared us to play by counting us in. What kind of preparation do you do / need to do / want to do before ‘leading’? Before teaching?
3. There were various ‘levels’ of the group. Some were ‘ahead,’ perhaps because they were predicting what was to come, had previous experience &/or were impatient. Others were ‘behind’ perhaps because of challenges with coordination, less experience etc. What are the parallels when we’re leading &/or teaching a mixed level group?
4. Were you playing with your head or your heart? What were the implications of this?
5. Given the three main learning styles (audio, visual & kinesthetic) which were you paying most attention to & how does that reflect on you as a leader, a learner & trainer? That is were you mostly listening, watching or drumming?
6. When you were playing the drums were you focused more on sticking out or fitting in? What implications does this have for you as a leader, learner, trainer?
7. When you were playing the drums were you focused on creating your own rhythm or were you influenced by the rhythms around you? What implications does this have for you as a leader, learner, trainer?
8. At times the group was ‘in the zone’- that is the sounds were smooth & in harmony. Other times they were a bit rumpled & glitchy. What made it go smooth? What made it glitchy? What implications does this have?
Tags: drum cafe, leadership, learning & development
Surprise … German style
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Humor & comedy
I went to an adeaters festival here in Nairobi & laughed out loud at some of the award winning ads, including the one below.
It must have been written by a Carrot Life Lens™. Ahhhh those details!
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: adeaters, humour, persepctive
An app to help you manage your energy, not your time
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Change management & wellness
Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney via Compfight cc
I recently read an article on mapping your personal energy levels. The gist is to manage your energy not your time.
Hmmm. That’s an intriguing notion.
The idea of filling in boxes via pen & paper to try & map my energy filled me with dread though.
Inspired by the ah ha I had on a recent safari- queen of apps am I but had never thought to look for an app for safaris (yes, there is one & it looks great – it’s downloaded & ready to be used on our next safari) I started searching for an app that could help me track my energy levels. (As a Carrot Life Lens™ it’s sometimes hard for me to see the patterns so this app is plenty welcome.)
Check out the short video of said app, which is called Juice. It’s downloaded & ready to go on my end.
Now the question is do I have enough energy to use it?
Social Innovation Safari
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Change management & wellness
What do you get when you combine an Iraqi, 3 Kenyans, a Canadian & a person from Botswana? A Social Innovation Safari of course.
That’s my small group above. From left to right: Elizabeth (Kenyan lawyer), Bestoon (healthy environment consultant from Iraq), moi, Tim (Kenyan IT guy), Peter (Amani coach, from Botswana), & Brizan (social justice activist from Turkana, Northern Kenya).
I was one of 20 international participants, from East Africa, Iraq, Germany, the Netherlands, Argentina & India, to take part in the Amani Institute’s first ever Social Innovation Safari in Africa. Through 10 intensive, chaotic, emotional, capacity building, fun loving, exhausting, energizing, adventure filled days we learned an eight step process to create innovative ways forward & through social challenges.
- Burning; understanding what lights your fire, what your purpose/passion is
- Sensing; understanding the problem including assumptions, taking a deep dive to gether the information you need
- Questioning; reframing the problem
- Idea Networking; structuring the information, mapping the system & leverage points
- Associating; framing & reframing
- Idea Creation; finding solutions to the problem (I love how far down the list this is!)
- Experimenting; testing your solution, creating & using prototypes
- Impacting; solving the problem, looking at impact from various perspectives including the beneficiary, organization, society etc.
We applied our new found knowledge to partner organizations who had social challenges for us to work on. Our challenge was how to increase the number of urban & rural girls accessing a local reproductive health information hotline & website.
Team building happened throughout, including on our way to Naivasha for a retreat. It was great having Jika onboard, for many reasons, including the fact that because she’s a postgrad student in public health, she had hand washing supplies (where there were none in the public toilets).
We started learning about the social innovation process in the best classroom of all …. the outdoors.
And we were reminded that sometimes, as Stone is visually represented below, the solutions can be right under our noses.
We paired up & tried our hand at making our partner’s idea of an ideal wallet, learning valuable lessons about prototyping & deep diving along the way. See our masterpieces below.
We did a ‘deep dive’ into the minds & hearts of our many stakeholders, trying on their perspectives for size & analyzing the repercussions. Many sticky notes were used in the process.
Back in Nairobi we headed into the field to conduct focus groups with young people at a university (picture to the right) & in a slum. My heart broke hearing stories of young girls getting pregnant & being kicked out of their village & of a 13 year old mother & sex trade worker.
We saw the results of many minds & hearts hard at work on the social challenges, including a young artist who’d made this poster for the health centre we visited.
I invited my team over for dinner one night & chuckled as the guys helped with the cooking … for the very first time!
In amongst the chaos of learning & relearning I was able to interview Emmanuel Jal for an article on peacebuilding & the arts in Africa.
Kindly, he also agreed to sit on the panel, who listened to our presentations on the last day. (That’s Roshan to the left above, co-founder of the Amani Institute, with Jal & I.) That’s our team below presenting our results.
All in all it was a magical, mystical experience. I’ll be unraveling the many, many lessons learned & working to apply them to upcoming projects. I’m so loving the adventure that this learning brought & continues to bring. Here’s to social innovation!
Tags: amani institute, change, emmnauel jal, social innovation
Can friendship be reduced to an algorithm? Yes! Says Sheldon of the Big Bang Theory
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Diversity & culture, Humor & comedy
One of my kids got me into watching the tv show ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ If you’ve not seen it it’s a bunch of uber, over the top, academically smart students trying to make it in a world of confusingly, erratic, unscientific, unpredictable, human behaviour.
The Heart Life Lens™ world of subtle emotions & intuitive hits can seem like foreign territory to an extremer Head Life Lens™ (like Sheldon).
One of my favourite examples of this is a clip when the most over the top academic, named Sheldon, tries to reduce friendship to an algorithm. It’s funny stuff. You can see the short clip here.
What about you – what’s more foreign to you? The world of the heart or the world of the head?
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: big bang theory, humour, perspective
What’s your key to life? And would your 5 year old self agree?
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Creativity & innovation
“When I was 5 years old, my mom told me that happiness was the key to life.
When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wrote down ‘happy’.
They told me I didn’t understand the assignment.
I told them they didn’t understand life.”
Wise words, likely from a Heart Life Lens™.
This came to me from my dear friend & colleague Dolly Hopkins. While I can’t confirm the author, whoever wrote it knew what they were talking about.
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Success is not always what you see (from one carrot to another)
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication, Diversity & culture
This cartoon from Emotionz via my colleague Jules Andre-Brown, had me laughing out loud. It’s such a great illustration of the difference between a Carrot Life Lens™ & a Mountain Life Lens™.
Mountains may miss the depth of Carrot systems, while Carrots may miss the view from above that Mountains have.
Which view are you most comfortable with?
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: humour, perspective
People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow ~ Eric Hoffer
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Change management & wellness
The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow. ~ Eric Hoffer (American social writer, 1902 – 1983).
Words for a Go Life Lens™ to aspire to when they’re having a bad day. A natural perspective for a Stop Life Lens™.
And you? Done anything in a hammock lately?
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: eric hoffer, go lens, hurry, leisure, stop lens
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Diversity & culture
I live in Kenya. My kids go to school with kids from some 52 other countries. A friend of mine, whose kid hangs out with mine, is from the state of Georgia. When she sent me my first text with y’all in it, I laughed & was oddly excited & proud.
Thinking about those many times when I’m caught both trying to make myself understood in my home-away-from-home or to understand someone else (for example a native Swahili speaker), made me appreciate the following survey.
Caveat- this is a most U.S.-centric survey, but having said that it’s pretty darn fun.
Thanks to the NY Times survey, you answer 25 questions about how you pronounce words & what you call specific things. It tallies your answers to give you a map that displays where (in the U.S.) speaks most & least like you. My results are above.
Some of the answers are almost poetic. Who knew somewhere in the U.S. people call it ‘the wolf is giving birth’ when it’s raining & sunny at the same time?
Another interesting feature of the survey is you get your results to your last question immediately after you answer it. See my example below.
More about the quiz:
Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux’s current website.
The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz.
Truth be told, diversity comes in all shades, flavours & sounds. And that’s a very good thing.
Thanks to my pal Sharon Bressler, who passed it onto me,
Tags: bert vaux, dialect, diversity, harvard, NY times, scott golder
Robotic hand beats you at your own game, every time
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Change management & wellness, Humor & comedy
“A robotic hand designed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, Japan, will beat a person at rock-paper-scissors every single time, says The Daily Telegraph. “Rather than any magic or mathematical algorithm, the robotic hand in fact cheats its way to victory by ‘seeing’ which of the three hand-shapes its human rival is about to choose before making the form of rock, scissor or paper accordingly. Using advanced motion-sensing technology, the robot’s analysis is so quick as to be imperceptible to the human eye. ”
I couldn’t resist this one (as the name of my company is Rock.Paper.Scissors Inc.).
Cheating? Magic? Boring? Best thing ever?
Depends on your perspective.
(Hmmm, wonder if robots have perspectives.)
~~TGIF- each Friday I rejig & re-post a blog entry from my www.life-lenses.com blog, which is about enhancing our perspective & worldview.~~
Tags: humour, perspective, play, robot