Greetings from Barcelona☀️
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest. Special shout-outs to Silvia in Rio, Lilian in Nairobi, Chris in Brussels, Dami in Oyo Nigeria, Delia in London, Mamen in Barcelona, Joan in Mansfield, Connie in Toronto, and Barry & Michaele in Bracebridge.
If you are joining for the first time, welcome to our deep dive into facilitation, learning, and how to live a creative life.
You can catch up on the last edition ⚔️ Why Movement is Your Secret Facilitation Weapon and all past editions here.
Publish an article every day?
I was trying to decide whether to join a 30-day writing course called Ship 30 for 30. Immediately I thought of every reason why this was going to be impossible.
- It would take me hours to publish every day.
- I don’t have enough ideas.
- Who’s going to read it anyway?
😅I decided to ignore my inner critic and sign up for Ship 30 for 30 anyway.
Ship 30 for 30 is an online course that helps you develop a daily online writing and publishing habit. The keyword in the sentence is publish. Publishing daily helps you to test your ideas in the real world, get feedback quickly, and build an audience.
🤯It’s a completely different approach to learning than the one I was taught in school.
The instructors are intimately familiar with the problems that prevent first-time writers from succeeding. And they have designed the whole course around these challenges. Instead of working for months on a big essay, you start with bite-sized 200-word essays. They give you templates so you can start publishing from day 1.
📈One of the instructors called it “lean learning”.
That’s because it’s like the lean start-up approach to launching a business or product only applied to learning. It helps you get the right learning, to the right audience at the right time, in the right quantity, while being flexible to change. And it’s perfectly suited for learning in the digital age.
💪So far I have published 17 essays in 17 days.
It now takes me half the time to publish an article than when I started. I feel like I am bursting with ideas. I have met other online writers with the same goal in every corner of the world. We give each other feedback. And they keep me accountable. Even if I were to miss a day, seeing others publish gives me the motivation to keep going.
Lean learning can help your students and participants learn more, learn more quickly, and learn better.
How can you use the lean approach to make learning better?
That’s our Quest for this week🔎
👉10 ways you can take a lean approach to learning
👉Doing-Being-Doing Facilitation Podcast: Part 2
👉Learning new skills
PLUS
📅 Announcing Breakthrough Facilitation March course dates! Cohort 2 will run from March 15 – April 7, 2022.
Join the waitlist to receive the latest course updates, demo session invites, discounts, and more. Thanks to the 40 Quest readers already on the list!
📈How to take a lean approach to learning
A Twitter thread I wrote with lessons from the Ship 30 for 30 course.
Here they are in a nutshell:
1/ 🤔Understand why your students fail. Make a list of the most common problems they face and design learning to overcome these problems.
2/ 😣Share your struggles. Share your mistakes so your learners don’t have to make them.
3/ ✍️Practice what you preach. You set the bar for learning, and it puts you in your learners’ shoes.
4/ 🪜Develop templates and frameworks. Give learners the tools to be successful from day 1.
5/ 💭Use concrete examples. This makes it easier to understand what success looks like.
6/ 🎯Apply straight away. Your learners can put their skills into practice while the learning is still fresh.
7/ 🌍Connect learning to the real world. It makes learning less abstract.
8/ 💡Come up with a Minimum Viable Product. This gives learners a simple way to create something and test their ideas.
9/ 📈Learn from data. Get feedback from your learners about what is working and what could work better.
10/🌀Iterate. Use the feedback to make continuous improvements.
What have I missed?
Read the full thread with examples from Ship 30 for 30 👉 here.
🎙️Doing Being Doing Facilitation Podcast – Part 2 is now live!
Thanks for your reactions to last week’s Doing Being Doing podcast Part 1 with the talented Shalini Menon. Here’s the link in case you missed it.
Part 2 is now live!
Have a listen as we explore:
👉The benefits of learning virtual facilitation
👉 How to take your groups deeper online
👉The Breakthrough Arc – a tool that will help you create the conditions for breakthrough
Check out the full interview 👉here.
Listen to all episodes of Doing Being Doing 👉here.
💡Tweet of the Week
💌Thanks for reading The Quest
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Creatively yours,
