diversity is my university
Not sure when this photo was taken, but I managed to repair it a bit and make it into this in illustrator by tracing, extracting, separating, colourizing and re-compositing. Dad’s lookin’ serious.
I would normally crop out the space above their heads, but that house looks cool. Here is what it looks like un-traced, recolourized and re-composited. Shadows look better, mom’s sandals are clearer, but overall it’s a pretty blurry image, which actually lends itself well to this process.
I’ve been attending a number of events lately that have loose and strong connections:
First, I want to talk about Social Media Camp, as it was a pretty huge event with a really broad spectrum of topics in the realm of media, marketing, communications, pop psychology, statistical, technical, platforms, design and more. Myself and the TEDxVictoria group attended with a very gracious invitation from the organizers of the conference. There is pretty clear cross-over between our communities as we are both into technology, the sharing of ideas, and a pretty keen appreciation for design and entertainment. We attended to do outreach, passed on the booth concept, and instead donned our branded t-shirts and roamed around freely with our mailing list signup forms on our iPads/Android Phones/iPhones/laptops. I’m not against booths at all, but there’s a lot to be said for the attendee experience and the natural emergence of good connections through conversations between sessions. We were also there to learn as a group, bat around ideas, debate the merit and value of trends and certain perspectives. For a group of people that work together for fun, this is a very important thing to do. You start getting a sense of how each other think and process things in front of you, have discussions and start sharing brain cells.
Here is what I got from some of my favourite talks:
I found it extremely easy to network as the conference’s attendee culture, subject matter, infrastructure and technology worked well together. Hashtags were well utilized and discussion was fast and frequent.
This one has faded from my memory a bit since it was a few weeks ago. I went to learn about how an unconference would work in practice – I’m used to a more top-down approach to curating and objective setting, and it was interesting to see what would emerge from the framework and gathering of people. One of the things I liked was at the beginning, which might explain how the unpredictability of the conference works to the advantage of relevant outcomes. This is taken from Harrison Owen’s Open Space Principles:
In particular a very short talk by Ruben Anderson caught my interest, and it was on the topic of systemic problem solving, something I like thinking about (and hopefully I am a part of). I don’t gather this subject is generally well understood or appreciated, but it has a definite effect on everyone.
One of the sessions ended up being about how to break into the culture of change in Victoria. Being from Victoria, I didn’t know that it was difficult to break in – that’s my blind spot. I’ve never found it hard to get involved with causes and movements that mattered to me, but I’m not coming in as someone new. This reminded me that the need to open up spaces to new participants is important for the sake of fresh ideas and innovation at it’s core – by occupying a position in an organization for too long, for example, I may be a part of that problem. It’s a bit tricky to articulate, but I realized that my own movement is important. I know I am not short on having a voice, but from this session I learned that there are still plenty who have some challenges in this department, and getting out of the way is actually something I can do to be productive on a larger scale. I had suspected this from intuition, but actually hearing it from people who were new in the community made it concrete.
Pretty much directly related to the above learning, Welcome to the Board was a workshop put on by an adjunct professor from UVic’s school of public administration in conjunction with Volunteer Victoria. It was about governance, effectiveness, conflict resolution, staffing and sustainability.
Putting in structures for terms of reference, roles, responsibilities, setting up committees and length of time “in office” made for a pretty relevant workshop. Building in set terms for board members means that new blood can enter the organization and a board can systemically fix the problem of being closed off.
I’m not sure how to apply this to committees, not sure if it’s needed, since members can come and go a lot more fluidly within that structure.
There were other learnings in here but I figure the structure and governance of boards, and focusing the purpose committees is something that I can use for many years to come at work and in my volunteer role(s), such as that with TEDxVictoria.
There is a group of us from the TEDxVictoria team at #SMCamp – if you’re also at this event, we’d love to connect – find us and we’ll chat. Today we (Laurel, John, Dylan, Carol-Lynne and Davin) are in black and red TEDxVictoria t-shirts.
This image is a hybrid of paperclips, filtering and photography by Adam, and more photography and vectorizing, scaling, recolouring and layering by myself. creativity!
But what could it mean?
Leadership is a topic I gravitated towards in my business degree years ago. I stocked up on leadership electives and applied the concepts broadly in all of my other courses as much as possible, since one of the roots of business is leadership in essence. Whether you’re building a new company, changing the course of an existing one, or maintaining a the existence of an organization through turbulent economic conditions, leadership continues to matter, if not magnify. You can have all the hard skills in the world to run a business, but if you do not understand primal leadership, you’ll be running a business on your own. Possibly with no clients.
One of the best books I read on the topic of leadership wasn’t part of the curriculum at all. This one, Primal Leadership, was handed to me by a friend who travels the world and gives advice to nations looking to improve their health care systems. It’s a book by three authors, one of which you may know because he wrote the book on Emotional Intelligence.
Short form: If you’re in a leadership position and you do not have a grip on this subject, you can unwittingly destroy your organization from the inside with ease. I’ve seen business owners annihilate their own organizations first hand because they didn’t understand how their decisions were affecting those around them. Myself, I have also done or said some things that I regret, after having understood this subject better through this book in particular.
Longer form: As a general theme, the focus on transformational development rather than transactional drilling means that the leadership role relates to the environment it exists in, ie the real world, where change is a certainty, and it has an affect on team members not just in energy terms, but also in emotional terms. Being aware of the emotional wellbeing of your team, clients, citizens, as well as yourself requires specific competencies, which we do not all have by default.
Four major concepts are explored through a variety of organizational and environmental lenses in story form and in straight up research-driven reporting:
As you may have guessed while reading that list, these concepts can explode into vast depth in book form.
They do.
This book has oodles of data and stories to explain why this approach matters so much. My opinion is that energy is precious, and we live in an economy of individual good-will, where people only put their best in if they feel they are valued and treated well. When that feeling leaves them, so does the prospect of their best energy, ideas, and ultimately work. Without emotional intelligence, our ability to count the currency of good will is abysmal at best.
With emotional intelligence, less time is spent on:
With primal leadership, more time is spent on:
There’s quite a bit more that I could talk about, but I feel like I have said enough in this post for now. If you want to chat more about this subject in some sort of specific context, connect with me.
Today, the sight of Clover Point meant I was beginning the final kilometre of a 10k run. Great day to be outside and active.
Songhees skyline
Dear Hugh,
I started off by sending your parent network a letter to let them know what has been published in your paper, specifically the article titled “Educate First Nations to be Modern Citizens.”
While I am not surprised by the overtly racist opinions that still exist in Canada, I am deeply offended by the notion that you see it fit to publish and spread this hateful speech. Are your advertisers aware that their messages appear beside such regrettable material? Do you think they’ll be keen to advertise in the future? But that’s just business, and is the least of my worries.
What about the human cost?
Do you know what an oppressive world looks like? Do you know what an oppressive world feels like? Do you know that so much of oppression happens because of what people believe? And do you know so much of what people believe is based on what they hear from people and publications that they trust? Do you have any idea of how much power you have? Do you have any idea of how deeply you’ve misused it? How can you sleep knowing that you are actually making the world a worse place to live?
I can tell you what an oppressive world looks like. It looks exactly like your newspaper right now.
I sincerely hope you learn something from this.
Davin
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Update: Nanaimo Daily has pulled the article, though fortunately and unfortunately, it lives on through the Huffington Post.
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Update: Nanaimo Daily’s publisher, Hugh Nicholson, has issued an editorial clarification, in which he states “the letter should not have run“:
In the Wednesday edition of the Nanaimo Daily News, a letter to the editor ran from Mr. Dan Olsen, which has caused considerable consternation among some of our readers.
While we would defend Mr. Olsen’s right to hold and express his opinion, the sentiments expressed were entirely his own and in no way reflect the views of the newspaper.
The letter should not have run.
We apologize for any distress this may have caused our readers.
Hugh Nicholson
Division Manager
VING
Looking forward to more summer beach nights..