Flexing Collaborative Muscle

Posted on February 8, 2017 by vladepap

The second version of the Social Leadership cards is coming out, ready to ship for Feb. 15! This is pretty exciting to me for a few reasons.

These cards were produced in a true collaboration between key players, Sam and Phillip, as well as support from the wider Sea Salt Learning team. It’s really a project that I would not have been able to deliver in our timescale all by myself. That’s a big deal to me, as someone who has spent most of my career being the one stop shop for instructional design. The Social Leadership cards definitely show what we can do together, when we flex our collaborative muscle.

image-uploaded-from-ios-1

This version of the cards have a new dimension that I hope will help us to understand how ideas are shared and spread among ourselves, in our communities, networks and organizations. In this version, there are 30 cards in total. 10 cards for each of the components of the NET model: Narrative, Engagement and Technology. While the cards associated with the first two groups, Narrative and Engagement, are more geared towards personal reflection and growth, the Technology cards are made to be shared with others.

I got the idea from a card that someone had at a conference in San Diego. She gave the card to my colleague I was attending with, Julian. The card she had was a challenge: that teh receiver had to lie on the floor in a public place until someone came to check that they were ok. The person lending aid would receive this card, which had a way to register it printed on it. It seemed a simple concept, to register a card that you receive from an action and I immediately wanted to apply this to the Social Leadership cards. At the time the first version was in production. I wanted to take the development in stages, improving and finessing with each version.

This project has also been an experiment in agile, allowing me to share and test out ideas a little at a time. My natural state is flexible when it comes to projects, you can never know when inspiration will strike! I enjoy the possibility of putting something out there and seeing the response, the project expanding with every iteration. Without this process, we would have a very different card deck. Indeed, I had the idea to make cards a year ago, but it wasn’t until I made the opportunity to go for it that they became real.

Finally, this project is definitely a stone on the path to Delivery that I committed to in an earlier post. Having ideas is fun, but if they sit in your brain, they are useless. Putting it out there and exposing it to reality makes the good parts stronger and helps you make decisions about the weaker parts.

If you’re interested in signing up to beta test these cards or any future Sea Salt Learning projects, you can sign up here.