Day 11: Why a Social Sabbatical is Like a Working Out Loud or lernOS Circle
I had a lot of time on the flight from Frankfurt to Bangkok more than a week ago and spent a good chunk of it looking out the window at the ever-changing land- or cloud-scape.
The pictures above reflect very nicely how all 11 of us seem to live our learning adventure here in Thailand: There is a certain stability in what we’re doing (represented by the wing in every picture) and the rest is — so far — different every time we look: One moment more gray and stormy, the next clear and sunny, in between quite dark.
(I have to admit that I was totally fascinated by the cities in India that we flew across in the middle of the night.)
Both in that way and a few others, the Social Sabbatical, which is supposed to be an important learning experience, reminds me of the many learning circles I have participated in over the years following the principles and guidance of Working Out Loud (WOL) or lernOS (Note: The German lernOS site is more comprehensive).
It is the 5 elements of WOL, in particular, that truly characterize for me what I experience in my small circle of collaborators (with Cristina Ricaurte and Zvone Mandic) and beyond.
Purposeful Discovery: In this case, our learning goal to orient our activities is the Scope of Work we have agreed on with our NGO Kenan Foundation Asia. It is what we are supposed to help them with — better Beneficiary Engagement and Community Building through better use of digital technology.
Generosity: While it stays for the most part in our team of three, ‘giving to each other without expecting anything in return’ is absolutely necessary so we can achieve what we want in the short time we have available. We also experience this generosity when we get together with the other 3 teams in the evening and discuss each others’ projects and get valuable input.
Growth Mindset: I believe we all came here with a lot of it already, and truth be told: Without it we’d be toast… We arrived at our organizations with essentially no knowledge about them and want to produce something meaningful with value for them in a very short time. We have to grow very quickly, and it is one of the fun aspects of our challenges!
Relationships: They are the key to everything we do. We’ve built them with the larger team (including our coordinators from PYXERA Global and mentors and SoSa alumni from SAP), we’re still building them throughout our organizations, we benefit from them with our personal networks, and we develop them further every day in our core team. A previous SoSa participant told me that they measured their success by the sustainable relationships they built during their time on assignment — and they’re still meeting with ‘their’ organization once a quarter years later.
And last but not least: Visible Work: In German, they say “Do good and talk about it.” Through our Social Sabbatical and what we write about it (like this blog) we give visibility to SAP’s Corporate Social Responsibility activities and our personal contribution to ‘improving people’s lives’.
What our Social Sabbatical requires even more than a WOL Circle is self-organization and self-discipline — our 4-week time box helps a lot with that.
Because learning together with others and building a network of helpful resources I can draw on any time works well for me, I can only recommend that you try out a Working Out Loud circle (especially if you want to focus on the networking aspects) or a lernOS circle (if your main motivation is more on getting into a topic, such as podcasting, sketchnoting, digital collaboration, or personal productivity). All it takes is 1–2 hours a week during a learning sprint of 13 weeks.
Check the links above.
