My learning

The power of the uncomfortable keynote

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I was privileged in the last 48 hours to attend two of the best keynote presentations, actually no, the two best keynote presentations I’ve seen in my twenty years of attending education-related conferences. Three things made them stand out for me:

  1. Diversity: Neither of them looked like me, sounded like me, or had grown up in a world that I have any meaningful knowledge of;
  2. Quality: Both were inspirational in their contributions to society, and spoke from the heart with passion, expertise, wisdom and eloquence; and
  3. Dissonance: Both made me feel, at times, quite uncomfortable within myself as I listened to their stories.

I want to touch on all three of these, but devote more focus to the third.

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Learning from agribusiness and the value of looking outwards

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In my three years working at Flinders and the seven years before that doing consulting work across a whole bunch of other unis, it has struck me that the Higher Ed sector isn’t always brilliant at ‘looking outwards’. I’ve been guilty of it myself on many occasions – in the face of a problem, the first point of call is often to reach out to my counterparts in other Unis and ask how they’ve tackled a similar situation.

Not that this is all bad, in fact it makes perfect sense in a lot of cases to avoid reinventing the wheel. Where it falls down is the potential for having the same sets of eyes with the same knowledge and experience finding the same solution for a similar problem, leading to ‘institutional isomorphism’, i.e. every organisation ending up looking the same in how they operate (Simon Marginson talks about this at a more organisational level in some of his papers like this one, but it applies just as well on a smaller scale I think).

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The IT project governance group – kickstarting Agile behaviour change in a Digital Workplace project

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I scared an Agile coach this week.

I’ve recently taken on a project role as Product Owner for an IT project we’re calling the Digital Workplace project, which aims to more effectively leverage several collaboration technologies (such as live chat, document sharing/collaboration and project planning/management) across the professional services teams at the University. Although I’ve called it an IT project, there’s really very little new technology in it, and it should really be called a behaviour change project underpinned by accelerated technology adoption – or something. In fact, all three likely tech tools involved are already available to all staff, it’s just that very few people actually use them.

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Farewelling my smartwatch – a tale of data value

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I stopped wearing my smartwatch this week.

Or, to be more accurate, I stopped wearing the latest smartwatch that I have been wearing. I started off with a Fitbit Charge HR (arguably not a smartwatch, I’ll give you that) until that fell to pieces, then moved on to a Sony Smartwatch 3, and then had a brief dalliance with a borrowed Ticwatch S. They now all sit abandoned while I toy with the idea of putting them on eBay, taking them to bits or strapping them to the dog while I’m at work to see just how active he isn’t during the day (greyhounds are good like that).

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Empathy, empowerment and expectation in customer service culture

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I left my Local Bike Shop (LBS) today.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the right one, even after having bought my previous three bikes from there (the first back in 2010) as well as one for my Dad and two for my partner, as well as having them do plenty of servicing and repair work for me over the years. I’ll leave out the reasons I left my former LBS other than to say that a recent interaction left me feeling very dissatisfied as a long-term customer.

Don’t shove things into your spokes people, nobody wins

What I do want to focus on though is why I chose my new one out of two potential options, and why this is important for service organisations in an increasingly depersonalised world. It was all to do with the willingness to think beyond an initial problem and work out a creative solution, to use empathy, and to try and think of things that could be done rather than things that couldn’t.

In short, it was all about empathy, empowerment and expectation.

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