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Originally uploaded by ahp_ibanez

I’m getting increasingly annoyed when people tell me something is important. In the end and if I’m not mistaken – importance is determined subjectively, not objectively, isn’t it? I’m glad to agree with you about the importance of your concern, but then please share your reasoning. Tell me why something is important, and why I should care. And while you’re at it: Please be able to back your claims up. If you do so, I’ll listen attentively, I’ll try to follow your reasoning, and if I do, I might agree and take action. Not just because you tell me something is important.

Unfortunately, political appeals and messages seem to be doing just that. The result of this week’s conference?

• 
Considering the exceptional importance …
• Considering also the importance …
• Noting that xxx have an historic opportunity …

The message continues claiming that “there is an urgent need” to do something. Why? By whom?

What if we banned the words “important”, “historic”, “unique” and “urgent” from our vocabulary? We might actually be more successful in communicating the importance of our aims.

And while we’re at it – we might want to rethink the effectiveness of these messages: Just because a group of people agrees that someone (else) should do something specific, it ain’t gonna happen. Sometimes good old campaign strategy goes a long way: Understanding the issue, analysing the power balance, identifying allies and obstacles, defining a critical path of change, and finally making the right demand to the right person at the right moment.

Michele Martin over at the Bamboo Project has some excellent posts about how to incorporate reflective practice into your own work, and into the work of your organisation. She also points to an introductory paper by Joy Amulya which identifies a number of situations that benefit particularly from reflective practice:

Certain kinds of experiences create particularly powerful opportunities for learning through reflection.

• Struggles provide a window onto what is working and not working, and may often serve as effective tools for analyzing the true nature of a challenge we are facing.
• Some struggles embody a dilemma, which can provide a rich source of information about a clash between our values and our approach to getting something done.
• Reflecting on experiences of uncertainty helps shed light on areas where an approach to our work is not fully specified.
• Positive experiences can also offer powerful sources of learning. For example, breakthroughs in action or thinking are helpful in revealing what was learned and what our theory of success looks like.[...]By locating when and why we have felt excited or fulfilledby an experience, we gain insight into the conditions that allow our creativity to flourish.

Now we can become more purposeful—not just about our learning but about how to work in more creative and sustaining ways.

A good motivation to pick up pen and paper again when I’m going through one of them.

Life is what you make of it. And while it will never turn out the way you plan, it’s up to you to take advantage of what comes your way. On recommendation of the Communicatrix, I used some of my long long train ride to Sweden thinking about ways to turn 2008 into my Best Year Yet. This method walks you through the steps of acknowledging your achievements, disappointments and lessons of 2007, and then turns to beliefs and values and things. In the end, you’ll have a one-page plan with guidelines, a paradigm, a major focus role and ten goals. I went through a few iterations, and boiled my plan down to three words. With a hat-tip to Chris Brogan, I’m sharing them here.

Connect, Rejoice and Grow.

Image by Wendy Longo via flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

I have never met Leng Sopharat. Until three weeks ago, I hadn’t even heard about her. Nevertheless, I’m helping to send her to college.

Here’s what happened: One afternoon, Beth Kanter blogs that she has just added Shirley Williams to her top friends in Facebook. The reason: She was the first to donate to Beth’s fundraising campaign to send Leng – an orphan from Cambodia – to college. In the same post, Beth promises that she will acknowledge the first thirty donors in Facebook and on her blog. I am enticed, and a few clicks later I’ve left a couple of Dollars at PayPal to support the campaign. It doesn’t take fifteen minutes, and Beth adds me as a friend on Facebook. Half an hour later, a blogpost appears: I was number four to contribute.

Of course, the story isn’t over yet: Beth raises the 1.000$ needed to fund Leng Sopharat’s college year within 24 hours, only through online social media (Blogging, Twitter, Facebook). She then extends the campaign to send a second student – Chanphearom – to college, too. Eighty individual donations helped to reach this second goal as well – after ten more days.

Thank you, Beth, for starting this wonderful fundraising experiment. It was an honour to contribute.

And next time someone tells me that social media doesn’t have any impact in the real world, I can tell the story of how Facebook and Twitter send two young orphans to college.