A sustainable future for Enrol Yourself?
Opening up our strategic process for input from our community.
In November we ran a series of collaborative events, open to all past and present Enrol Yourself participants, inviting input that will inform the direction we take next. We hoped to:
- Crowdsource ideas and energy.
- Provide a chance for people to reconnect, and make new connections.
- Practice transparency, openness and cooperation.
- Allow people to learn from the process we’re going through (we’re all about learning after all).
I’ve written this post to keep the conversation going — to update everyone who participated, those who wanted to participate and couldn’t, our wider community of interest — and invite further connection or collaboration.
We started by inviting everyone to join one or more of four events, designed to enable participation from a variety of locations — and around jobs and other commitments:
- An online ideas jam.
- A face-to-face ideas jam in London.
- A ‘Get Shit Done’ day in London to develop ideas further.
- A hack day, for developers, to explore building a specific function for the Enrol Yourself website.
A sustainable future for Enrol Yourself?
For a small team I think we’ve been pretty prolific since 2017. We’ve been hosting the Learning Marathon, training the hosts — and working with organisations including Friends of the Earth, Nesta, Government Digital Service, Shift and more.
- 130 people have now participated (or are participating) in the Learning Marathon.
- We’ve trained 10 Enrol Yourself hosts in 5 locations (2 of these are former participants).
- 98% of participants say they would consider another Learning Marathon at a different stage of their life or work. 6 people have already started a second.
- Participants have used the Learning Marathon to set up side projects, start businesses, develop freelance careers, boost their income, improve their mental health, sustain creative or spiritual practices alongside work — the list goes on.
I am proud of what all these people have done together. We’ve bent as far as we can to make the Learning Marathon accessible to people with a huge range of circumstances. Bar £15k funding (from the Our Place in the World award) we’ve done everything through our own income, sweat and blood!
Enrol Yourself will be 3 years old in April, and it seems we are at a crossroads. Margins for the Learning Marathon, our core offering, are too small to keep things moving. So we’re taking a pause. No more Learning Marathons open for applications right now: so we can reflect and create as well as do-do-do.
We know that peer groups have educative and supportive power for people, particularly at moments of professional or personal transition. We know that a Just Transition to a new economy will require billions of these individual transitions. We know our approach is replicable. So the big question is how do we sustain our impact?
1. Online ideas jam
With all that in mind, we brought this big question to our community, starting with an online ideas jam. A bunch of friendly faces joined us from Birmingham, Bristol and beyond. We presented two sub-challenges, one about community and the other about fundraising, and as a group we collaborated using a Google Doc where everyone contributed their ideas and suggestions. This was a fruitful way of making sure everyone could be heard, and suggestions were captured. The idea here was to cast a really wide net and bring in divergent thinking.
2. Face-to-face ideas jam
We then repeated a similar process, but face-to-face, with a fresh set of participants. Here we used a 1 2 4 all method for rapidly generating ideas, questions and suggestions, with the same aim of divergence and generative thinking — without too much (if any) analysis.
3. Get Shit Done day
We then gathered up all ideas, questions and suggestions from both jams, sorted them into promising categories and took over a room at Somerset House for a day, to work up some of those ideas or take them further. Thanks to the Institute for the Future of Work for supporting us with the space.
We split into three groups to work on different things:
- Ongoing community participation beyond the Learning Marathon. This group looked at what light touch ongoing support beyond the Learning Marathon might look like for members of our community — and they explored financial models that might sit behind this.
- Eight possible future visions for Enrol Yourself. This group rapidly worked up a series of visions, each describing a different future. These ranged from Enrol Yourself as the learning version of Weight Watchers, to a facilitator training organisation, to a platform where you can grow your own learning journeys — and more.
- A totally new idea! This group explored new ideas for a platform through which people could license the toolkit for community events or experiences, making recurring income from that license. Could this be a vision of the future of Enrol Yourself too?
4. Hack day
Finally, we gathered some of the tech wizards of our community to explore building a specific functionality for the Enrol Yourself website.
This year we created pages for prospective Enrol Yourself hosts on our website so they could get expressions of interest from their network. This allowed them to test the water before committing to working with us over a considerable length of time (9 months +). The purpose of the hack day was to see if we could allow hosts to autonomously create these pages via our website; a step that could really help us support more hosts in the short-term, and prototype what our support could evolve to look like in the longer-term.
We looked at the user journey in detail to throw up important questions. Two approaches to building this function were proposed. We broke into teams, one of which managed to get the basics working within just a couple of hours.
5. Then came synthesis
We distilled all ideas, suggestions, visions and mockups onto 16 cards (to be precise). We then plotted those cards against an agreement and certainty matrix, which helps to sort suggestions into simple, complicated, complex and chaotic domains. Simple is like following a recipe, complicated is like sending a rocket to the moon, complex is like raising a child, and chaotic is like the game ‘pin the tail on the donkey’. These analogies can help to ascertain which suggestions are quick wins, which might come with greater risk and what might be possible in the longer-term future.
What’s next for us?
(Any thoughts, ideas or responses to the below are welcome to find me via email! zahra@enrolyourself.com)
- Design experiments that test possible futures for Enrol Yourself. More soon on what these are and how people can get involved.
- Think about how we might create a regular rhythm of community input. This process was an amazing way to feel supported, test assumptions and gather new inspiration. And those who participated said they appreciated the chance to see what’s really going on beneath the surface, and contribute.
- Plan a programme of light-touch post-Learning Marathon peer-support for 2020. There seemed to be strong consensus that once you’ve experienced the type of relationships you develop within the Learning Marathon, you want to sustain these, but with less intensity. We’ll be thinking about how to make this happen and further suggestions are welcome.
- Train the next wave of Enrol Yourself hosts. Through these events we’ve started cooking up an evolved approach to how we do this. Look out for more information soon, and if you’re interested in hosting — get in touch.
- Continue to work with organisations whose projects and goals align with ours. For example this year we worked with Friends of the Earth to design and pilot Own It, a peer support network for women to take climate action through their personal finance. If you’re curious about how we could work together, I’d love to hear from you.
- Take a well earned break over Christmas and New Year. It’s the closing of a decade after all…
A particularly huge thank you to Sarah Adefehinti and David Heinemann who co-organised and co-hosted these events.
If you’d like to keep up with what we’re up to at Enrol Yourself, you can do so via our mailing list, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
