Tag: planning

Planning for 2023: Black Box Organizations

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A living organism can survive only by exchanging materials with its environment: by being an open system.

Vega Zagier Roberts

Every year, around this time, I like to share a tool which can help with your planning.

Though the shift from 2022 to 2023 is just a quirk of the calendar, the arrival of a new year tends to focus our attention on what’s coming. People make resolutions, use the holiday season to take stock and decide where they want to go next, or treat January 1st as a turning point for their lives at work or home.

This year, I want to share a tool which I created after reading Vega Zagier Roberts’ essay “The Organization of Work“. It explores organizations of all kinds – from projects to families, from teams to institutions – as “black boxes” with inputs and outputs.

It gets us to reflect on the pressures which are placed on us from within and without when we try to manage undertakings. It can form the basis for useful questions and reflections at the outset of a project, whether you carry out the task alone or with others. And it can also give insights into the state of a system which is already in place.

To start off, choose an organization, project, or undertaking which you want to reflect on. If you’re doing this task with others, you may each like to draw your boxes and follow the steps separately, or you can work together on, say, a shared whiteboard.

Draw a box like the one below, with an arrow going into it and an arrow coming out:

We can imagine that systems are boxes like these: something is put into them, they do their work, and as a result of this process, something emerges on the other side.

Read more →

Open to uncertainty? Workshop for OER22

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Together with the Open University’s Anne Gambles and Simon Ashby, and Open Education Global’s Executive Director Paul Stacey, I’ll be running an online workshop for the OER22 conference hosted by the Association for Learning Technology.

Our session, “Open to uncertainty?”, explores ways of strategic thinking which support the goals of the open education movement in times of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity.

In addition to practical, participatory activities, we’ll share experiences from the Open University’s ongoing ‘Islands in the Sky‘ project and last year’s development of Open Education Global’s new strategic plan.

OER22 is a hybrid event running 26-28 April, promising to “put the spotlight on both the value and limitations of open education in a (post)pandemic world”. Find out more at the conference website.

Library Journal: COVID-era scenarios for Reading, Pennsylvania

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“It was clear we should not wait out COVID-19. We needed a vision for where our services were headed, even if we couldn’t fully see what lay in store.”

In Library Journal, Bronwen Gamble of the Reading Public Library in Pennyslvania writes with me about our experience developing COVID-era scenarios to inform strategy for one of the United States’ oldest public libraries.

You can read our piece “Change the Scene” at the Library Journal website.

Planning for 2021: Value-Creating Systems

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Every year, around this time, I share a simple tool which might help people think ahead when making personal plans. In 2019 and 2018 I offered variants of the “Arrows of Time” diagram. The arrows provide a way to reflect on the things which may await us in the coming year, and those from the past which will still be with us on our journey into the future.

This year, I want to share a different tool. You still don’t need anything more than a pen and paper to use it.

This year, I want to think about relationships and values.

2020 has been a strange and difficult year for many of us, with more of our life than ever before spent online: in Zoom meetings and conference calls, online quizzes and get-togethers in new, sometimes awkward, digital settings. All of the emotions, frustrations, and opportunities of these spaces have been magnified by the pressures of COVID-19.

We increasingly expect, and are expected, to deal with constant streams of information from many sources. There’s more stimulation, but we might also be more distractible, less focussed, less aware of our environment, less able to process everything cognitively and emotionally. We might not be tending our relationships as well as we might.

So why not take a moment, map your relationships, and see what difference they’re currently making? It might guide you in the decisions you make as 2021 arrives.

As always, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, trying to bring together the work of a few different thinkers and writers in a simple tool. I’ll tell you more about the sources I’m drawing on at the end of this piece.

But before then, if you’re willing to join me, it’s time to get started.

We’re going to draw a map. Let’s begin by putting you at the centre.

Read more →

“Where Do We Go From Here?”: Fundamentals of Design for Uncertainty at MNYLC

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Over the next two weeks, I’ll be presenting free lunchtime webinars for New York’s MNYLC, helping people through these turbulent times with a brief introduction to simple tools that help us address issues of uncertainty at an organizational and strategic level.

Sculpture of a question mark lying on its site, by Keith Edkins – CC BY-SA 2.0

Over the two hour-long sessions, we’ll look at mapping the uncertainties within a given operating environment, identifying areas of opportunity or concern, and using structured questions to prioritise and develop actions that address those uncertainties. The sessions take place 1-2pm EST on 10th & 17th November.

You can find out more about the webinars at the MNYLC website.

Draw Your Day: Reshaping Time During Lockdown

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How are you spending your days under lockdown or restricted movement? Which parts of your routine have changed? What’s working for you and what’s not?

How do you perceive time – have days begun to run into one?

Are work and home life still easy to separate? Do you have to fit your job around childcare and homeschooling? Do you notice when the weekends arrive?

Draw Your Day is a short activity using a pen, paper, and some basic shapes to help you examine and rethink the ways you’re spending time during lockdown.

It’s based on a tried and tested activity from workshops I’ve run around the world, derived in turn from a task set for students by the comics scholar Nick Sousanis. It’s quick, and it’s fun.

Draw your day

If you’ve got something to make a mark with, and something to make a mark on, and you’re curious about your relationship to time during lockdown, you can watch the activity and take part on YouTube; the whole thing takes about half an hour.

Planning for Uncertainty: Scenarios & Foresight for Local Government

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On Tuesday 5th May, 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 4pm in the UK, I’m teaming up with ELGL (Engaging Local Government Leaders) to talk foresight, scenarios, and planning for uncertainty in local government.

ELGL Banner

Find out more at the Eventbrite page for this event.

Free webinar: Introduction to Scenario Planning

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A full recording of the Introduction to Scenario Planning webinar which I recently led for Britain’s CILIP is now available to watch free online.

The short session provides a practical nuts-and-bolts overview of some scenario techniques and approaches, designed to support organisations that are new to the process as they seek to make sense of future uncertainties and take wise long-term decisions.

You can read more about scenario planning, and how we might use it to think our way through the current pandemic more carefully, here.

The Library as Value-Creating System

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Here are a few thoughts on how we might apply the Value-Creating System (VCS) approach – which focusses on relationships as much as transactions or products, emphasises collaboration as much as competition, and incorporates values other than the financial – to public libraries.

Box full of colourful characters and figures with placards labelled "Library of the Future - Some assembly required

What Does a Library Do, Anyway?

It can be hard to define a library’s purpose these days.

This is more of a problem for public libraries than for other institutions. Universities and colleges have well-articulated information needs, as do hospitals, courts, and other government bodies, or large enterprises which employ librarians of their own. Libraries within these organisations serve the information needs of a specified group, and often those needs and services are pretty well defined too.

Public libraries, however, struggle more with self-definition. They provide a wide and varied range of services, plus the communities they serve are often more diverse and less tightly defined. Some corners of Libraryland have been talking about this online for a while. Read more →

The Complete Yoga for Futurists

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We might be excellent at making plans, but what future will those plans have to inhabit?

How do we take into account the roles and relationships which define our world, when we try to imagine that world’s future?

How can we cultivate flexibility and mindfulness when it comes to thinking about the futures which may await us?

If you’d like to reflect on these questions, the final “Yoga for Futurists” is here.

“Yoga for Futurists 3” is a standalone instalment of my video series offering “rough and ready” ways to swiftly improve the conversations you’re having about the future and your place in it.

You can watch the complete 3-part “Yoga for Futurists” playlist on YouTube.