A peek inside UNHABITAT training for Urban Youth Fund Grantees in Cairo
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Diversity & culture, Training & development
Hello from Cairo! I’ve just finished day 2 of 6 days of training for the UN. I’m revamping the UN LEL series curriculum for a youth audience & the training participants, from around the world, are participating in a gap & asset assessment to examine how youth can better engage with local leaders. I’m also […]
Tags: cairo, communication, united nations
Suck or blow? Power surges & power vacuums
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development
Waaaaay back when, when I used to do leadership training with youth, we’d sometimes play a game called suck & blow. It involved passing a playing card around a seated, circle of people, without using your hands, only by way of mouth to mouth. You could only pass the card by sucking in (holding the […]
Tags: david tees, fred fisher, james macgregor burns, locally elected leadership, power, united nations
Speaking English kills you (& other ways evaluations can go sideways)
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Human resources, Training & development
Program evaluation can leave you feeling like you don’t know if you’re coming or going. I do a lot of program evaluation work because it’s often so painful for my clients that I’m eager to show how it can be done with ease & even creativity & humour. I was particularly proud to be asked […]
Tags: program evaluation, sojo, united nations
There’s a 6 foot long green snake living in my banana tree
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Diversity & culture, Training & development, Travel
There’s a 6 foot long green snake living in the banana tree in my yard. So said my ‘friend’ Roman the other day while we were out walking the dogs. Trying not to faint, with eyebrows askance, I said ‘Really?’ ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘but don’t worry it’s utterly harmless.’ I was pretty sure he was […]
Tags: humour, international development, kenya, privilege, self-awareness, united nations, wes darou
No better way to learn about your own cultural training & development roots than to immerse yourself in another
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Diversity & culture, Training & development
Have you entered the cultural training & development contest yet and grabbed a chance of winning a free Life Lenses assessment? No? What are you waiting for – deadline is June 15th. As I mentioned in a previous post watching out for too-near hippos by night and too-curious monkeys by day, I’ve been fortunate to […]
Tags: body awareness, cultural elements, cultural intelligence, culture, formality informality, life lenses, physical space, time, united nations
Where’s your off switch?
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Change management & wellness, Training & development, Travel
When I was doing some training for the United Nations in East Africa a while back, some friends and I got together one night at a house to watch a movie and make cookies. The cookie dough never made it to the oven (a destination few cookie dough batches in my world meet) and the […]
Tags: 24/7, health, off switch, united nations, Wellness
Learning about change & the power of music to rock the world from United Nations ‘Messenger of Truth’ Sara Mitaru©
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Change management & wellness, Social Responsibility
Imagine being able to write “Messenger of Truth” as a job title on your CV. That’s what the incomparable Sara Mitaru can claim. What exactly is a messenger of truth? The United Nation’s Messengers of Truth (MOT) Project has 3 major objectives: to inform youth living in slums and inner cities of the Millennium Development […]
Tags: messenger of truth, sara mitaru, social change, storytelling, united nations
Learning means converting & translating
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication, Training & development, Travel
I was recently in Turkey doing program evaluation training for the United Nations, which meant carrying a variety of ubiquitous plug adapters. I laughed at the above combination of plugs – all feeding into one that would fit the hotel outlet, allowing computer and IPhone to charge. The need to convert, change or adapt in […]
Tags: delicious, Get Friday, hootsuite, social bookmarking, technology, turkey, united nations, virtual assistant, youtube
Putting learning technology in the back seat – where it belongs
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Communication, Diversity & culture, Training & development, Travel
At its best learning technology should disappear into the background, allowing the learning to shine. At its worst technology is so much in the foreground that nothing else is discernible (enter video conferences where participant faces look like something a Star Wars make-up artist dreamed up while on drugs). Recently, while doing some training in […]
Tags: karun koernig, learning, learning technology, messenger of truth, sara mitaru, technology, turkey, united nations
Putting fun and evaluation in the same sentence
Posted by Lee-Anne Ragan | Filed under Business & organizational development, Human resources
Evaluation terminology is enough to make you want to hide your head in the nearest toilet. And flush. Program logic models, median, mean, outcomes, indicators, activities, outputs, baseline, denominators, dissemination, focus groups, inductive, deductive and the list goes on (and on and on). Yet, program evaluation can be incredibly valuable and necessary. I’m teaching a […]
Tags: activities, baseline, deductive, denominators, dissemination, evaluation, focus groups, indicators, inductive, learning, mean, median, outcomes, outputs, program evaluation, Program logic models, training & development, united nations