Journeys end … ?
It is now a year since I started my 6 month sabbatical. And then, almost immediately after it was due to finish, we entered lockdown.
The sabbatical has been a blessed time for me, and I have enjoyed learning from all of the different perspectives that are out there – a real opening out.
And lockdown has caused me to re-focus, to bring together the key learnings into the actual difference I want to make.
It is fifteen years since I started advocating participative virtual meetings and workshops. It is about ten years since I started training virtual facilitation. It is eight since I completed the book: ‘Meeting by Design – Harnessing the web to revitalise meetings’. I have been wanting people to recognise the huge untapped potential of virtual meetings for over a decade, but much of that has been ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ sort of stuff.
And now, with lockdown, and a realisation that things will not go back to how they were, the subject is gaining a lot more traction.
My time in sabbatical was intended to help me understand what was needed to drive change, and ironically the world delivered the answer – to a point.
People are changing their behaviours, and they are doing more online meetings, but those meetings are still pale reflections of what they could be – they still fit within an out-dated paradigm that has its roots back in a history of command and control. The technology has changed, but as a friend pithily observed: ‘They have simply put the off-line on-line’.
Perhaps the most helpful learnings I have taken from my sabbatical have arisen from ‘The end of history illusion’ and ‘Growth mindset’, and the realisation that a healthy personal vision of our relationship with the emerging future is key to influencing that future rather than simply reacting to it.
I believe my role is to help fuel that vision. To feed it with ideas and insights, and simple practical ways that it can be prototyped, tested and applied. And that has led to two roles for me: meeting.toolchest.org, where I can freely share resources to support that feeding; and culturistics.com, where I can work with organisations to deliver their future more strategically and assuredly (and feed my own learning and growth).
And so, this blog is moving. It is merging into the meeting.toolchest.org blog, where I will be focusing my attention. I am writing this in the hope the you will be able to make that move with me via https://meeting.toolchest.org/thinking-differently/subscribe/ (if you have not done so already). In any event, I want to thank you for your help and support over this time, and I want to wish you the very best as you build your own relationship with the emerging future.
With kindest regards,
Mike