Week One of "Power of Pull" Book Club

The first week’s questions from the LrnBk Chat on “Power of Pull” included the themes: Passion, Serendipity, Learning, and Creating Change. See http://lrnbk.blogspot.com/.

How do we help others find, leverage, and kindle passion?

To help others kindle passion in their work we need to address their entire environment: provide support, tools, and enable connections.  Convince people they can "pull" the information they need.  Show them how to go out and figure out how to do their jobs best.  Let’s help others marry their passion with their profession. 

According to John Seeley Brown, organizations must be re-crafted to serve the needs of individuals.  That will require serious change.  That sort of serious change can't come from the top down (that's PUSH).  It must come from within the organization with leader support.

How can we map passion to profession?

Let’s ask people what attracts them to the job and find out how the organization can facilitate connections that help foster that passion.  Perhaps we need to be doing “stay” interviews; find out how we can make the profession one someone can be passionate about.  Let’s invest time in genuinely *knowing* people in the organization, in the work path and outside of it. 

What did the Grommets learn about learning?

Grommets didn't focus on learning. They focused on their passion, their joy and through this they learned and improved their skills.  They learned by learning together, studying their performance and the performance of others.  Grommets made learning fun; learning happened as a byproduct but drove success.

What are lessons for those of us in learning and development (L&D)?

Learning requires performance feedback and practice. Collaboration and support are key elements. We need to build a way for employees to get access to knowledge flows when needed.  L&D needs to set up two way communication and sharing of best practices.  L&D must support and provide the platforms - creation spaces really moving away from command and control.  We are better together then we are apart.

How can we 'create' serendipity?L&D can create serendipity for our employees by sponsoring events that bring people together who share the same passion.  Serendipity requires being "out there" constantly, in search of new ideas.  If you follow your passion, you'll be in a place to learn when it happens.  You may not be expecting a payoff in your search but all of a sudden you have a serendipitous encounter.  L&D needs to facilitate learning experiences that allow for serendipitous encounters.

Creating change:  Saying "The edge transforms the center”, the authors assert that we need to start by working to change individuals, not institutions.  Do you agree?

We must change individuals.  Change comes from individuals working from the ground up.  How can an institution change if the individuals do not? Start with the people who display their passion and branch out from there.