Embracing Broadsiding

Today’s installment is about thinking sideways! We’re going to talk a little more about how to increase your networking worth on LinkedIn through Broadsiding

I was looking for information on health services in Ontario. Rather than go through the impenetrable maze that is the government, I looked up individuals on LinkedIn who might know more, explained my situation, and sent off a few requests. While I didn’t get what I was looking for, I  changed the conversation towards learning and development with a few contacts, to see what might come of it. The end of the process netted me a few contact points that I hope to explore further.

Broadsiding is known by many other names or concepts. The idea is to approach a contact not from its most immediate point, but perhaps through other avenues. Doing some research, do you find people in an organization who share an interest, or a point of confluence?

Join LinkedIn groups (This should be a no-brainer!) and contribute, contribute, contribute. Even if it’s just a post every so often, or your own blog post, throw them out there and see what you can do! Networking may not be about approaching a problem directly, but finding the six degrees of separation between the people who can help you the most, and the people who help them!

The Three Things You Can Do Better on LinkedIn

Networking on LinkedIn is a little old-hat, isn’t it? Receive a contact request, accept it, and the person is instantly shuffled off into the ether of your digital rolodex, never to be seen again. Send a contact request, and face the same thing from the other side. It’s a sort of choice paradox redux, wherein the sheer number of your contacts decreases the value of each of them.

What’s in it for you? How can you make your social networking experience on LinkedIn easier, from start to finish? How can you make yourself more visible to your contacts? Let’s walk through three things you can consider before you click “Connect”.

Keep Things Simple

Brevity is a tricky thing - As you might see from my blogs, it’s a difficult thing for me to work on, as well. The idea of brevity in this case is a little more complex than it sounds. Let's take a look at some things you can do to keep things simple:

Do Your Research

When you want to connect with someone, or someone wants to connect with you, take the time to look up their LinkedIn page. it’s a small step that can get lost in the noise, but looking through their LinkedIn page gives you a good idea of whether or not their addition to your contact list will help you.

When sending a contact request, target it as much as possible. If you’re looking to expand into a certain field, look up companies with positive reviews on Glassdoor for a particular position. Send targeted contact requests to people within those departments or in human resources for the organization (Hiring managers or related personnel).

Research the company, even if it’s as superficial as going to their webpage, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. Is there anything new or interesting happening that you can use as a lever to open a discussion?

When you get the inevitable follow-up, be prepared with questions to ask, whether they’re general to the position and challenges, or specific to the organization’s processes: Don’t. Waste. Their. Time.

The more targeted and specific your contact request, the less likely it is to be turned down.

Use The Message Box

When receiving a contact request, nothing turns me off more than a blank message. Who are you? How did you find me? What do you want? I feel like Liam Neeson in Taken.

If I don’t know anything about you, and you’re not willing to volunteer, why are you sending me a contact request?

All this to state a very basic principle:

Use. The. Message. Box.

You’ve got 160 characters to explain who you are, what you want, and why. Start with their name. Don’t worry about yours, they already know it. What do you do? What do you want to do? What do you need from them - Contacts, an informational interview, job opportunities? Ask and ye shall receive, but don’t leave the message box blank.

All the research you’ve done should be boiled down into that little white box. If you can’t boil it down, either the request is not worth your time, or you won’t get accepted.

Embrace the box. Use the box. Be the box.



Next time, we’ll talk about my other two points in this series, Embracing Broadsides and Providing Bite.

What are some strategies that have worked for you? What are your biggest gripes and pleasures about networking through LinkedIn?







As always, I’m happy to hear comments and start a discussion on LinkedIn or through Twitter.  @LnDGuru.

Have a great day!

The Zen of The Single Task: Strategies For Single Tasking

In my last blog post, we explored the importance of single-tasking: The idea that you should spend time on individual tasks instead of having multiple tasks running in your head at the same time.

While it’s great to suggest this gently to everyone online, I’d like in today’s blog post to explore some ways you can refocus on individual priorities when your workday is spinning out into multiple tasks, competing priorities, and general stress.

Let’s go with the Three R’s of single-tasking:

Recognize

The only way you can deal with stress is to recognize it.

The only way you can deal with stress is to recognize it.

The only way you can deal with stress is to recognize it.
Am I getting through yet? Our day is composed of many small, varied stresses. Dealing with multiple e-mails, having ten browser tabs open, answering phone calls while checking e-mails, eating lunch at your desk, responding to e-mails while in meetings…

Good God, sometimes you must wonder how you can cope.

Coping isn’t the hardest part of stress. The hardest part of stress is recognizing it. In the last blog post, I recommended keeping track of your stress on a day-by-day basis, hour by hour as necessary. Find your symptoms - Do you find yourself going to the office coffee machine often? Do you distract yourself and take microbreaks? Do you get a lot of chatter in, and distract other people to make things easier?

Once you’ve recognized your symptoms, it’s time to…


Respond

Simple. Effective. Repeated. These are what your stress responses should look like. I’m going to go through three self-responses to stress. Chances are, you find yourself doing these already, but my guess is that you don’t use them regularly enough. Use them multiple times a day, and you will find yourself remarkably less stressed!

1) Belly breathing.

We’ve all heard the advice “Breathe in, breathe out”, but I’m going to ask you a basic question: Are you doing it right?

Belly breathing, or the practice of breathing from your diaphragm up, is much more effective at calming a stressful time. Train yourself to do it - When you find yourself clenching your teeth, speaking in rapid-fire sentences, feeling a flutter in your stomach, or getting fidgety, put one hand on your chest, and one hand on your belly. The hand on your belly should move, the hand on your chest shouldn’t.

Good. Now, count to five on the inhale, count to five, then count to five on the exhale.

This takes time. Time you could be using to do other things. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? You can use those three to five minutes to make a small dent in your work, or you can take those three to five minutes to focus on your breathing, lower your blood pressure, and give your brain a moment to do what it does best.

2) Clenching

Stress can be a physical response. You feel it in your neck, your jaw, your arms, your back. Anywhere and everywhere.

So, let’s get rid of it by getting rid of the buildup. Clenches are incredibly simple.

Starting from your toes, clench every muscle group as hard as you can for the count of ten. Toes, calves, thighs, butt, abs, back, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, jaw, eyes. Everything you can think of. Clench them hard, breathe through your belly, and count to ten. It’s especially effective if you can lie down while doing it.

3) Self-Talk

Whether or not you can believe it, the thoughts running around in your head contribute in a significant way to the stress you experience. 

Programmers call it rubber-duck debugging, the process of going through their code and explaining the logic and process to a rubber duck, like you’d find in a bathtub. Saying it out loud means that they can hear and correct their thought process

When you experience the stress and anxiety of your workday, I need you to step back from your desk. Whether that means standing up and turning away from your monitor, finding an empty meeting room, or just going for a walk around the office, get away, and ask yourself a few questions:

- What am I stressed about?

- Why is it stressful?

- Am I helping? - Are you responding the way you need to, or is your response making it harder for you to get things done?

- What are some things you can do right now to help yourself?

Beyond the admittedly abstract practice, self-talk allows you to self-debug. Going through your thought processes to determine what you’re stressed about, whether your stress level is appropriate, and what you can do to fix it, will dramatically lessen the stress you feel throughout the day.

Refocus

Done de-stressing? Great!

Now your job is to figure out “what next?” Prioritize, and either tell yourself verbally or mentally what to do next, or write out a to-do list with as few items as possible - You don’t want to reload on your stress by seeing a vast list of things undone.

Take a minute and do these things throughout your day, and you will find a calm order to your life that may have been missing before!

The Zen of The Single Task

Spend ten thousand hours on one task; observe a task completed by mind and hands.

Spend one hour on ten thousand tasks; mourn work never finished 

Mindfulness meditation is the practice of regular silent contemplation on a singular topic. More challenging than it appears, it requires a gentle but constant discipline to remain focused on a single thought. 

Organizations from the Mayo Clinic to Harvard to the American Psychological Association have trumpeted the benefits of this singular practice. But for many, the hurdle of spending 15 minutes alone to contemplate is a frightening prospect - With so much to do in life, would you spend time sitting without doing anything else, on purpose?

Like every professional in learning and development, you need creativity and the ability to multitask. In the morning you'll work on one task, in the afternoon another, assuming you have no interruptions.

Does this work? In the midst of e-mails phone calls, scheduled meetings and reminders, do you have the time to produce work that matters to you? If your answer is what I think it would be, the solution is simple:

Focus on one thing at a time. 

In interviews for learning and development jobs, I like to make it clear that my work pattern is weird. That I bring weird to the job. I like walking around and thinking out loud. I like a softly-lit room with a whiteboard and a marker. I don't like sitting at a desk and expecting ideas to hit.

In other words, I create by focusing on a single task, at once. Do the same for yourself, whether that means taking a five-minute walk away from your computer, or turning off e-mail notifications and putting your desk phone on silent. Mindfully focusing on one task means you'll create better, more creative results. 

How? In one or two workdays, keep a notepad with you. Hour by hour, rank your productivity. Do you feel you're accomplishing things, on a scale of 1-10?

After three days, you'll notice patterns. Maybe your time from 11-12 is least productive. Maybe you're more productive in the afternoons; find out why. What is it about those periods, either their interruptions or motivations, that makes you work better or worse? Find your triggers, and you will find what makes you better at what you do. 

Mindfulness, simply put, is recognizing things one at a time, and acting on them. Be they weaknesses or strengths, getting perspective on life and work one thing at a time means that you will still do the same amount of work, you'll just know how to do it better.

As always, I love hearing questions and comments in the comments below, or on Twitter, @LnDGuru

Avoiding Revision Hell: Mo' Versions Mo' Problems

Thank you for allowing me a modified Notorious B.I.G. quote. I've been wanting to do that for quite some time. Also, today's the first day of a new font! Let's hope it makes my blog a little less stodgy, and a little more readable!

Let's talk about changes in documentation. The process of handling change documentation is a pretty wide and multi-headed beast. And with these kinds of hydras, it's really best to tackle one head at a time. I'll address some basics today, in the hope that it will spur inspiration on how to handle change for your own organization!

Version Control

I worked with a small e-learning shop that liked to store all the resources for all its projects in one place. Subdivided by client and project directories, it was a great way to organize. I was tasked with an update to an existing e-learning solution, changing some content to reflect changes in goverment regulations. I pulled the resources, sat down with a developer and made the changes. Go-live went smoothly and without issue.

The client called, six hours later, utterly mystified. The module didn't look the same, feel the same, have the same branding or language. How did small changes make such a difference?

After some investigation, the question was refined to: "Karim, how did you make changes to a six-year-old version of the module that no longer exists?!"

The short answer: Version Control

In its most basic form, version control is simply a way to identify changes to a project-critical document, track them, and stay updated. Think of a grocery list stuck on your fridge. Always updated, you know where it is, and it's easy reference for anyone who is taking on the task. 

If you're going to use version controls on your documents, here are some things you should know:

Use the Track Changes Function

If you haven’t already used it, the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word, as well as the Comments function, is a great way to see changes made in a document by different people, as well as insert comments for what needs to be done. Turn this on before every document you send to a client so you can more easily understand what changes have been made, and use comments to ask for clarification in areas. This will also allow you to accept/remove old changes from a document, and keep a loose track of when changes were made

 

 Keep a Change Log

Avoiding Revision Hell is all about keeping organized and staying that way. Using an Excel spreadsheet for every document, list substantive changes you’ve made (i.e. changes in branding, images, and content). This will help you see at-a-glance any issues as they arise, and will allow you to proactively address projects that may be slipping into excessive revisions before you have to play catch up! 

 

Version Naming

Changes should always be reflected in the document naming convention. If you've made global changes (Anything that affects page numbering scheme of the document, document style templates, images, or branding), you should create a new version. Old versions should be stored, and entries in the change log should have a distinct reference to the version number.

How you name your files is up to you, but you can't go wrong with a classic:

Descriptive Name - Date revised + Initials of last revisor  - Version Number.


I hope I have helped at least some of you to implement some changes to your practice that will save you a lot of time and aggravation in the future!

Has this raised any questions for you? Are there any tips or experience you'd like to share in avoiding endless revisions?  

As always, feedback and comments are welcome, and you can find me on twitter @LnDGuru. Let's start a conversation!

Avoiding Revision Hell: The Importance of Communication!

 Communication.


Definitely a word that can jitter even the most steadfast of souls. 28% of Americans rank Public Speaking as their number one fear, according to the Chapman University Survey on American Fears (Now THAT'S a title to stick with you!)

Communication with your clients doesn't have to be as fear-inducing. E-mails, phone calls, and even how you carry yourself in meetings - If you're reading this, chances are that you're not sure how to start communicating with clients or stakeholders: There's no single best way to do it, there's just the one that fits best with you!

As an Instructional Designer, the biggest part of communication in my work is about establishing relationships and respecting boundaries. 

How much leeway are you willing to give clients, stakeholders, and SMEs in your process of instructional design? No matter how much you decide, make sure the client knows. And make sure they know in no uncertain terms: Contracts, documentation, e-mails, and repeated messaging in meetings. Whatever works, or however you feel comfortable, establish boundaries now so that you won't regret it later!

I worked with a company whose SMEs were serially unable to understand the difference between nice-to-have and need-to-know. 

“Some of this technology is STILL in the field!” they’d cry, “What happens if someone doesn’t know about it!?”

 “They have e-mail, don’t they? Google’s also a big thing, from what I hear. I think that with the number of experienced guys in the field, it won’t be too hard”.

  Along with asking them a few other basic prioritizing questions, the truth was teased out, and I was able to provide a firm timeline with a two-week content block window – Two weeks before delivery, no new content could be introduced. That meant no revised images, text, or content. It forced a wholesale rethink of what could be done in the time they had, and what needed to be thrown out.

As we can see, more communication will inevitably help you. Don't be afraid to ask the questions that get you odd looks around the table, as long as you know what you need!

 Earlier I talked about changes to the alpha, beta, and final revisions of a project. Communication here is key, because you need to decide what constitutes “enough” change as opposed to “too much”. If you send a beta version of a document or project to a client and find that 50% of the version needs changes, is that too many? What about 25%?

 What do you do if that’s the case? From the outset, you want to point these things out to the client.

If you’re freelance, you can charge for what’s called a “Change Order” that lists the scope and number of alterations, because the scope of the project has significantly changed. The client needs to sign off on this change order, and will likely change their minds once they know this.
 If you’re within an organization, point out at the beginning that changes past a certain percentage of the project will require revised timelines that may push back completion significantly, incur extra costs, and require signoff.

Many of the people I've worked with as IDs are uncomfortable with "hard" communication with clients. Whether that's saying 'no', or requesting extra time or informing them of higher costs. "I don't like confrontation" is something I hear too often as a result: I can't tell you how to start communicating better, but it's amazing how quickly that phrase disappears from their vocabulary once they start losing money!

If you can't bring yourself to make the hard communications, try practicing first. Put a script down on paper, or look in the mirror and start running through the key points of what you need to say to your client. Even if you're uncomfortable, getting into autopilot when you're in that meeting or that phone call will definitely help you to represent yourself better!

No matter whether it's e-mail, over the phone, via webchat or face-to-face, communication is critical not only for your bottom line, but for your sanity as well as that of your clients! 


As always, feedback and comments are welcome, and you can find me on twitter @LnDGuru. Let's start a conversation!

Endless Revisions: The Bane of an Instructional Designer

Today’s blog is directed more towards those who are freelance designers, and everyone who has to work in client- or stakeholder-facing positions, but it’s fair to say everyone’s experienced it, and it’s called Revision Hell. You know the phenomenon: Storyboards, templates, modules, and all kinds of deliverables go through a revision process allowing stakeholders to make edits and changes.

 This spirals quickly out of control, ballooning from one or two people making content edits to senior vice presidents making tweaks to words like ‘or’, and ‘the’, because “it needs to fit the corporate vision”. Pretty soon, you’re at “Revision 13b3”, with no end in sight, and not enough coffee in the world to fix things.

Let’s take a look at some strategies to stop your projects spinning off into Revision Hell.

Setting Expectations 
This one is tough to do from the outset unless you’ve done it before. First, you need to know who will have touch with the document at what stage? Are Senior VPs going to be involved from the start, or is it just one or two people? What kind of changes will they be able to/allowed to make? Once you know, make sure to stay in contact with your stakeholders to explain what changes need to be made, and what changes they should avoid making – Try attaching a checklist of things to look for with every revision.

You need to let your clients know from the start of the project how your revision plan is going to work. I find that three revisions (In ascending order of magnitude) is the most effective method:

 1) Alpha - In this first revision, the course is between 20-50% complete. In a storyboard, various sections have been outlined, some have been filled in, and there are notes about what will come next, and what content still needs to be provided. In any application, the alpha should show the bare-bones of the finished product, including what information will be covered and how, and what information is missing. The client should provide feedback within a specified timeframe that will allow you to proceed

2) Beta - The project is 80% done, and the client can make changes to wording, images, and content. With facilitation guides and job aids, split the work into categories – Audio, video, images, content, text. Aim for an 80% completion rate for each so that you can get critical feedback to implement. Remember to always document feedback, deliverables, and delivery dates

3) Final - In the final stage, the client is only allowed to touch final wording and narration, correct any spelling, or provide final updated information. This stage immediately precedes sign-off.
This cycle tends to work pretty well for me, and as long as the client sticks to it, we’re both generally happy with the work that gets done.

Just remember that at every stage of the process, ping the client with reminders at the end of every week and a few days before any milestones to make sure they’re on track

Next time, I'll discuss how to set boundaries - Or, how you can say no to endless changes!

As always, feedback and comments are welcome. You can find me on twitter @LnDGuru, or check out my LinkedIn profile at https://ca.linkedin.com/in/thelearningguru

Let's start a conversation!