Learning Canvas with remote participants
Hi folks!
I facilitated a Learning Canvas with remote participants, and I’ll share with you this experience. I hope to inspire you.
We needed to start a discussion about one of the most important strategic issue for us, but our team work home office and one teammate lives 550 Km (341 miles) far from the most of us. Besides that, one stakeholder had a full schedule. The time was passing, but nooo! We can’t accept that!
Today, the distance is not an excuse anymore. We are connected!
I believe that we need time to innovate. The time can’t pass without innovation. If we don’t have enough time, my competitors do. So, as we love to work home office, we did part of it remotely :)
Learning 3.0 — "Sharing is the new teaching"
While I didn’t schedule the first activity (in this case, the Learning Canvas) to work with our strategic issue, too many people were asking me why I didn’t bring a company or expert to help us on that. I have no doubt too many companies and professionals could have a lot of experience, opinions, ideas and tools to help us, but all of this are based in a context different for us and will promote the 1 to N learning process, where we will formulate the questions and the expert will tell us the answer for each question.
In the other hand, we have a team with rich experiences, opinions and ideas too. And why we don’t to use their knowledge first? The key point, in my opinion, is facilitate this discussion and promote the emergent learning around this strategic issue.
The Learning 3.0 was proposed by Alexandre Magno, and is one brand of Happy Melly. In my opinion, is a great approach to work with complex issues, connecting people in a flow, sharing with no hierarchy, maintaining people focusing on the learning process and on the sensemaking. The learning product emerges from the participants. Workers define questions and the answers about what they want to learn, promoting the N to N learning.
The Learning Canvas
Learning Canvas is a tool of Learning 3.0 propposed by Alexandre Magno in his book How Creative Workers Learn. This canvas separates past and future. Problems, experiences in the past. Expectative, ideas to try in the future. This is very helpful to avoid interminated meetings where the focus always goes away from the center point: the question.
Learning Canvas have some actors:
- Facilitator: responsible to keep the focusing on the activity and owns the learning process.
- Asker: bring the issue and the problems to discuss.
- Sharers: share their experiences and ideas to help the problematization.
Facilitating the session
Everybody was very involved with this issue, because it could affect a comfort zone of some, the emotion of some, profits and etc. So, it was very important to explain a little bit about the Learning 3.0, Learning Canvas and suggest to keep the mind open, free of any judgements before the start of the session.
I needed an amplified speaker too, to hear better the remote participants on Hangouts or video, because usually only the notebook sound was not enough. And I used a simple one with some success.
One of our stakeholders can’t be present in the beginning of the activity, so I asked him to record some videos sharing his experience, ideas, opinion and vision about the issue.
What about a coffee-break before we start? :)
Learning — Connecting people
The final product surprised me, because I had a vision about the problem, and emerged a lot of different ideas from what I have in mind. I wrote the follow up with the ideas we selected to try. Besides that, in the following day I was surprised again with a presentation of Design Thinking in Life created by our UI Designer — Amanda Vieira member of our team (we will share it soon).
Really amazing!
In the end, I facilitated a feedback Canvas with a “ship theme” to collect more feedbacks about this journey, which made us drag and what propelled us.
Learning is a journey. I have` no doubts we still need too many others facilitated activities to learn more about our issue, but Learning Canvas is really simple to run in your organization. It can help you with emergent learning, promoting collaboration and maybe you can get really surprised with the result as I am now.
Why don’t you try yourself? :)
Thank you for reading!
