Triangulating learning
Nancy White has posted a very nice “white paper” (pun intended!) on what she is calling “triangulating learning.” Essentially she gives a clear picture of how to reach outside of your organizational boundaries to put social connections to work to increase creativity, collect inspiration and ground-truth ideas:
Triangulating learning through external support from individuals, communities and networks can provide significant, low or no cost support to innovators and learners within institutions. This triangulation requires networking skills and a willingness to learn in public – even possibly loose part of all credit for one’s work. The rewards, however, are increased learning, practical experience and ultimately the ability to change not just one’s self, but one’s organization.
via Full Circle Associates » Need Your Feedback on my Triangulating Thinking.
Those of us freelancers that have blogged for a long time are certainly familiar with this idea, but Nancy provides some very practical notes about getting started especially for people who work within organizational constraints.
Thanks Chris. I received a lot of really useful feedback on the draft and now need time to hone it. But what continues to strike me is a) how familiar/common sense this is but how rarely we make it discussable, explicit, etc. So creating the language and conversation space (yeah, hosting!) is important. When I talked about it with Peggy Holman and Juanita Brown, Peggy immediatly said “This is the Art of Hosting” work and I nodded and nodded.
b) The word triangulation is not the right word. It has too many other meanings!
waving from the road
Nancy
Maybe not the right world but it conveys the sense of reaching outside your self to help locate learning with some precision. Peggy’s response I think has to do with the fact that within the Art of Hosting CoP we are learning how to welcome and support ways of hosting myriad connections in the service of emergent learning, looking at new forms of collaborative organization and collective and participatory leadership. That is the edge we are on, and trying hard to teach and share the ultimately simple practice in clear and easy terms.
Mostly it;s common sense, but common sense and common practice are not the same thing and so we are very interested in finding ways to translate good and sensible ideas into skillful activity. This paper is a really useful way to think about why that practice matters.