Participation

‘You can take a horse to the water- you can tell horse drinking water  is good for its health -but choice to drink or not to drink water lies with the horse'. This is a statement that I had formed early in my career when I was working on learning and development space.

Over last few months I have realized that this statement is applicable to situations/processes where the efforts and results are not linearly related in space and time and area spread out across time. Career Planning & Execution, and Development are 2 such processes – you make efforts today but results may not come in the same year.

My new tagline on careers is – ‘Performance is ensured over a year while a career direction is built at least over 2-3 years’.

We harp on relevance- we learn or we work towards a career goal if it is relevant for us. We say that the challenge for the resource provider or the manager is to create a space/opportunity for employee to find relevance for him/her.

Let’s say that as a resource provide you have done work on both fronts mentioned above-you and employee have figure out relevant aspects and you have provided required resources.

And then - employee resists turning up to utilize the resource! You are left perplexed! What happened?

Maybe it is relevant but other priorities are at play.

I had been working on creating for last few months a program – working along with intended audience to ensure relevance of resources. On day of session, we clocked around 50% attendance. I wondered whether we could have had at least 60% attendance – that’s what I had expected. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at this situation. Those who attended seemed vested and involved in day and shared that they found session very valuable.

I saw them taking notes and thinking of how they will make use of learning's back at work.

Leaves me thinking – should we work on participation?

Sometimes we need to drive participation - to ensure people prioritize A over B where both are relevant and where they may not have realized importance/power of A. This is especially the case when A is career/development and B is performance.

Low participation undermines power of an initiative. High participation does not guarantee effectiveness. Relevance is critical.

Hence both relevance and participation are necessary but not sufficient resources by themselves. They go hand in hand to ensure success.

If required participation can be driven. If people choose to stay on as day progresses, that's a possible indication that efforts were worth it.

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Sourav

Communities!

How does one build a community out of a large group of managers?

 

I am not talking of just setting up a body and asking them to meet in regular intervals. The members must feel they are a part of the community and they are invested in success/failure of community.

 

Well!  Over last few months we took our first steps towards creating a community of managers.

 

We have rallied leaders/managers around a common purpose. So relevance seems to be there.

 

There was high business involvement in creating community. Leaders and managers are actively involved in running community.

 

So basic design elements for a successful community - relevance and business ownership - seem to have been taken care of. This is getting manifested in predictable periodicity- community has determined frequency in which it meets and agenda items for their meetings.

 

 

So what next? What should be imperatives in remaining months?

 

A core managerial/leadership group has been involved in designing and launching the community.  How do we get even more managers invested in success of community? That surely is an upcoming agenda.

 

We have made decent progress in facilitating sessions. 

But I feel facilitator’s needs upskilling in facilitation skills. Additionally discussion need to be more conversational – this will ensure higher peer learning during sessions.. These two surely are focus areas for next few months.

 

I like the term go-dos. It's catchy and it brings in element of transfer of learnings to workplace. We have made go-dos a unit of conversation of this community. 

But how do we know whether these  go-dos are getting done? How do we enable community members to egg each other on in execution of go -dos?  Are go-dos actionable enough?  These are areas we could further look at.

Technology can play a role here. We can create a virtual community space where managers come together and exchange notes at regular intervals (how do we build consensus around frequency?) on progress against and further learnings from go-dos.

 

 

A related thought – manager community is a large group- consisting of around 90 managers.

‘Large group interventions’ is a separate field of study. I am not sure whether this means that I need to do different things for this community or do things differently. That's something I want to explore further too.

 

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Sourav

 

Citizenship Behavior

It was around 4:30 p.m. on 26^th January, India’s Republic Day.

Megha and I were sipping on ‘Filter Kaapi’ in Mysore Café, Matunga and reflecting on the events of morning and afternoon.

We had spent 4 hours in Babasaheb Ambedkar Hall in Matunga Labor Camp, Dharavi witnessing a ‘Citizen’s Workshop’ for residents of the area.

It had taken Megha and me some effort to figure out where the Hall was.  We had weaved our way through a row of narrow alleys to make it there. I was reminded of old streets in Asansol and in villages of industrial Bengal – buzzing with activity but might make a newcomer feel ‘enclosed’.

We reached the Hall around 12 p.m. Not many people were there in the hall at that time. There was a group of young kids practicing a dance sequence they were going to perform on, and Vinitha and her friends/team members.

I was anxious and excited about this event. I had been working with Vinitha on how to ensure, efforts of her organization made an impact. ‘Impact’ for We-The-People meant people understood their rights and duties as citizens, took responsibility for the same, and displayed appropriate behaviors.

This workshop was built around a theme - what could residents in Matunga Labor Camp do in next few weeks, to ensure that they did the right things in upcoming Municipal Elections.

So the workshop had ‘immediate relevance’ for people we were targeting. They could implement almost immediately what they would learn.

Around 100 people turned up – that was an impressive number given that the workshop had been advertised entirely through word of mouth. Most participants were young mothers, and old men/women.  I wondered why I didn’t see too many young men and unmarried women – I still don’t have an answer to this. .

Soon we were into thick of action. 100 participants had split into 8-9 groups, discussing 1 of 3 themes of Role of Citizens, Role of BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation), and Role of Councillor. 

I was eagerly awaiting this part of the discussion. Vinita and I had talked at length, about need for making people take ownership for their behavior.   The facilitators themselves were a stumbling block towards ensuring we achieved this end.  They viewed themselves as ‘problem solvers’, but this mindset ensured that citizens/participants became perennially dependent on these facilitators when trying to address new situations.  It was necessary to make the facilitators empower the participants (helping them find their own solutions).

I was eager to see if both facilitators and participants accepted and played these new roles.

I was a bit uncomfortable during the initial part of the discussion within the groups.  The facilitators seemed to be instructive. I heard a lot of ‘Do this if you are faced with this situation’. I was becoming impatient and wondered ‘Where was the attempt to empower people to respond effectively irrespective of the situation?’

My anxiety started ebbing mid-way through the discussions. Slowly I found the participants connecting the dots, and stating to ask questions on how what they were learning could be implemented in other situations too.  By the end of the discussion, all groups had ‘citizen’ volunteers who came forth to present to the audience what their group had discussed and learnt, and what they were committing to do.

I realized that the journey from being dependent on a parent to being independent takes time, and can’t be an immediate process. Probably journey for any newcomer in a situation, would usually start from being dependent on a parent. The only variable might be the period and amount of dependency.

I noticed something else too. When the groups were presenting to the audience, everyone in the room listened with rapt attention. There were some 100 people in the audience, there was noise coming in from outside, and the sound system wasn’t the best you would come across. It was difficult to hear what was being presented, but everyone seemed to be zoned in and concentrating. I wondered ‘why don’t we see so much attention/concentration in classes in schools/colleges and in classroom training sessions at workplaces?’

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Sourav

Pedagogy and Andragogy

I, at times, land up for my dance classes early. I listen to songs on my Ipod, finish warming up and centering, and am raring to go but there still is some time left before I get in. What do I do?

For the lack of anything better to do, I sometimes peep in and observe what’s happening in class.

I find the Kid’s classes intriguing and amazing. There is only one adult in the room –the instructor. S/he is trying to teach around 30 kids in age bracket of 3-7 years how to dance. I observe the instructor animated, patient, and trying everything under the Sun to teach. I observe the kids doing what they want to do – some listen closely to the instructor and follow her/his instructions, others take a fancy for few particular steps and just keep on doing those steps, some others are looking around for their mummy, and then there are others who seem to be lost in their own world.

While I was observing one such class, Jim and Aparna (2 instructors- names changed to maintain anonymity J ) walked up to me and asked “What are you observing?” I looked at them and asked ‘Do you guys instruct kid’s batches too?’ They nodded.

Aparna said ‘They are the toughest batches to instruct in. I usually am mentally fatigued by the end of such a class. You just don’t know what holds their attention. You might have had a brilliant class today. You try the same thing tomorrow and it fails. You have to improvise from class to class.‘

Jim added ‘I have realized that words have limited impact on these kids. Illustration helps because then they start imitating you. What I do before each class is to figure out what I want the kids to imitate today. I go ahead and demonstrate/illustrate those in class and that seems to work. It is also necessary to make the class fun and play like. Kids love to play!’

We were about 10 minutes into our conversation when a senior colleague from office dropped in. He had come there to pick up his daughters who were there in the kid’s batch. In sometime Jim and Aparna left, and we 2 colleagues started discussing ‘Do adults learn differently and if yes, how?’’.

What do you think? How do adults learn differently from the way children do?

Yes, Malcolm Knowles does talk about andragogy (adult learning) and he does mention that adults learn when it makes sense for them, in the way they want to, and prefer to learn experientially.

But what does our own experience say about the way adults learn. How consequently should instructors change their style?. I have a few observations to make:

• Control is a key word for adults. One corollary of this is ‘We want to know why we are doing something’ which would translate to ‘We want to know how learning would have relevance for us’. Relevance is usually sometime in the near future. For the instructor, this means, the necessity to sensitize adult learners to how learning’s have relevance to their context and how they can use leanings in their work/lives.
• Adults do tend to be judgmental, usually rejecting what doesn’t fit in their world views. Judgment is usually a ‘parental’ characteristic. It is important for an adult to be in ‘adult, rational state of mind’ during the learning process. An instructor has a role to play in making a learner consider new/different ideas.
• It is also necessary to maintain ‘curiosity’ during the learning process – the fun of discovering something new and knowing that something interesting might be up for grabs at the next turn. Curiosity is a ‘free child’ characteristic. This combination of ‘curiosity’ and ‘adult state of mind’ is difficult to simultaneously maintain for adults but necessary for effective learning.
• The part about ‘What holds their attention’ is common for both kids and adults. If a kid is not attentive, s/he would show it. If an adult is not attentive, s/he may still fake attentiveness. I think it’s necessary for instructors to be keyed on whether the group at large is being attentive but if some individuals are not being attentive then the instructor should focus on those who are being attentive and have an offline discussion with the ‘inattentive individuals’.
• All of us require feedback. Feedback tells us whether we are on the right track and gives us the confidence to go ahead. Maybe as adults we prefer primary feedback – we try out something for ourselves and see whether it works. That’s where the emphasis on experiential learning for adults might come from. But that doesn’t mean children don’t need feedback. It is just that they might be okay if a teacher/instructor were to tell them whether they are on the right track or not. As an instructor, we have to figure out ways for adults to get primary feedback during the learning process. ‘I learn something, try it out, see for myself if it works or not, and make changes accordingly.’ Experiential learning is important for adults.

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Sourav