MICRO-LEARNING DONE RIGHT
Here's all you need to know: The attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds. The attention span of a human being is 8 seconds. Got that? Now, think about why most "Professional Development" programs in corporations under-perform. OK. time's up. Here's why:
The delivery platforms that most organizations use to "educate people" exceed most people's ability to concentrate. The content may be good, but participants' ability to stay engaged usually flames out in a few minutes.
Which is just one of the reasons why I love MyQuickCoach, the invention of Jon Peters -- one of the first multi-media savants into the Micro-Learning space.
Jon and his team have produced more than 2,700 quick hitting videos (usually 5 minutes or less), featuring thought leaders from a wide range of disciplines.
Here's one of yours truly on the power of appreciation and acknowledgment. I don't know if Jon has any goldfish for clients, but I'm sure he's thought about it.
Jon's email address: jpeters@athenastudios.com
MyQuickCoach
Innovation Starts with the Individual (1:38)
Idea Champions (that's us)
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:43 AM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2018Brainstorm Facilitation Training for Idiot Savants (and other wise ones)
This just in! Brainstorming in most organizations sucks. Or, if "sucks" is the wrong word, how about "severely under-delivers"? The good folks of Idea Champions (that's us) have found a way to put an end to this madness. Yes, we have. And yes, we can. Click here for a taste of where we're coming from -- 13 brief videos of us laying it all on the line. Think brainstorming is a waste of time? Click here.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2018KEYNOTE SPEAKING DEMYSTIFIED: There Is More Than One Audience
Recently, I gave a keynote presentation to 150 people in the health care industry. After being introduced, I decided, as I usually do, to leave the safe confines of the podium ("a platform raised above the surrounding level to give prominence to the person on it"), dismount the stage, and "walk my talk" -- weaving my way in between the 20 round tables in the room, each with their own pitchers of water, tent cards, and little bowls of red and white mints.
For a keynote speaker, dismounting the stage and walking into the audience is always a risk -- the same kind of risk people take when they decide to get married, instead of just date. Or, why it's often easier to love humanity than just a single human being.
People, in theory, are interested in learning. People, in theory, are interested in listening to an outside speaker, especially when he's flown in from who knows where. But in reality, it's a completely different story. How do I know? By looking. By seeing. And by feeling what is really going on.
To the AV guy in the back of the room, there were 150 health care professionals in attendance, but to me there were 12 different subgroups -- some large, some small. Twelve different mindsets. Twelve different tribes. And while they were all being paid by the same employer, they were all paying a very different kind of attention to what I was saying -- all thinking very different thoughts.
Mind you, I'm not claiming to be psychic or a mind reader, but after 25 years of doing this kind of work, a person develops a curious ability to sense what people are thinking.
GROUP 1: "Thank you! Thank you! Tell it like it is, my brother! Finally, somebody is speaking the truth! Hallelujah!"
GROUP 2: "Please do not come any closer to my table, sir. And, under no circumstances, approach me with a microphone. First of all, I have nothing to say and, second of all, even if I did, nobody in this room would be listening to me."
GROUP 3: "Excuse me. I... don't believe I've ever heard of you. Do you actually know anything about the nuances of our industry?"
GROUP 4: "It all sounds good to me. Makes perfect sense. But... um... er... how much extra work is this going to mean for me?"
GROUP 5: "I wonder what's for lunch. I sure hope it's not that awful chicken they served us last time. That wasn't chicken. That was shoe leather."
GROUP 6: "Flavor of the month alert! Last year it was Excellence. The year before that it was Lean Management. Now, it's Innovation. This too shall pass."
GROUP 7: "Hmm.. How can I seem to be interested when this guy gets close to my table so my boss won't think I don't really care."
GROUP 8: "Innovate! Yes! We totally need to innovate! Absolutely! Wait a minute! Isn't that why they pay our senior leaders the big bucks?"
GROUP 9: "Very cool. Good timing. How can I get my team on board?"
GROUP 10: "Earth to keynote speaker! It's all about priorities. I mean, if I had more time to innovate I would, but all I'm doing these days is running from one meeting to the other."
GROUP 11: "Theoretically speaking, I am with you 100%. Maybe 200%. But when push comes to shove around here, we are not in a business likely to innovate."
GROUP 12: "Innovate, schminnovate! We need more head count."
My point? Every keynote audience is a melting pot of varying perceptions, assumptions, and needs. In order for keynote presenters to be effective, they need to find their "golden mean" -- their own sweet spot between the inevitable extremes that will be represented by the audience. Any attempt to convert the "slackers" or align with the "early adopters" will create nothing but more separation, resistance, and duality. In the end, it all comes down to what Mark Twain said years ago: "When you speak the truth, you don't need to remember a thing."
MitchDitkoff.com
My clients
What my clients say
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2018The Awesome Power of Immersion
"If I had an hour to solve a problem," explained Albert Einstein, "I'd spend the first 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and the last five solving it."
Translation? One of the secrets to having a big breakthrough is immersion -- "the state of being deeply engaged, involved, or absorbed."
Immersion is the ocean in which our fabulous insights, ideas, and illuminations are swimming. That's why Yogis seek out caves, embryos gestate, and writers go on retreat.
And that's why my business partner, Steven McHugh, and I rented a townhouse in Boulder, Colorado for 30 days and 30 nights when it was time for us to start up Idea Champions. We knew we had a great idea for a business, but we also knew that ideas were a dime a dozen and that unless we really immersed we'd end up with nothing much more than a charming story to tell at cocktail parties -- the idea for a business, but not the business itself.
Armed with little more than a flip chart, a few marking pens, and a burning desire to create something new, we unplugged from all our other commitments and jumped in with both feet.
We talked. We walked. We walked our talk. We noodled. We conjured. We brainstormed, blue-skied, dialogued, role played, invented, read, sang, stretched, drank coffee, wine, the crisp Colorado air, and whatever else it took to free ourselves from the gravity of what we already knew. If this was Rocky 1, our townhouse was the Gym, Adrienne nowhere in sight.
And every night before we went to bed, blissed out of our trees, we'd remind each other to remember our dreams and speak them aloud the first thing in the morning.
CLUES. We were looking for clues, hints, perfumed handkerchiefs dropped by our muse while we slept and anything else that bubbled to the surface of the imaginal stew we found ourselves now swimming in.
Crackpots? No. More like crockpots, simmering in our own creative juices, unimpaired by the almost infinite amount of distractions we had grown accustomed to calling our life.
Immersed. We were completely immersed -- two eggs submerged in the boiling water of creation, heat turned up, lid on, timer off.
Our walls? The walls of our abode? Covered with paper, sketches, scribbles, post-its, quotes, pictures, lists, charts, diagrams, questions, and take out menus -- the barely decipherable hieroglyphics of our journey into who knows where.
The floors? Our mothers would have had a heart attack, littered as they were with anything we didn't have a place for. Rube Goldberg meets Fellini. Yin meets Yang meets Jung -- the flora and fauna of two aspiring entrepreneurs on fire with possibility.
But our immersion went far beyond the four walls of our abode. It was a state of mind, not a geographical location. It didn't really matter where we were. Walking by the creek or sitting in a bar was all the same to us, ruled as we were by our shared fascination, random silken threads of conversation with complete strangers, and the increasingly apparent sense that we were on to something big.
And then, on the morning of the 19th day, very much at ease in our townhouse abode, there was a knock on the door -- a loud and insistent knock, a knock both of us found rather odd since nobody knew where we lived -- or so we thought.
"It's open," Steven shouted from across the room. "Go ahead and let yourself in."
And there, at the threshold, stood a woman neither of us knew, a woman boldly announcing that, for the past three days, she'd been hearing about "these two creativity guys" and she just had to meet us, her business now on the cusp of either breaking through or breaking down.
I don't remember a single thing of we said, but whatever it was hit the nail on the head.
The next day, there was another knock on the door. Apparently, someone else had heard about our whereabouts. This guy had a business, too, or was trying to have a business. He spoke. We listened. He spoke some more. We listened some more, occasionally asking a question or two and sharing some insight. He too, got what he needed.
On the third day, Jesus did not rise from the grave, but, yes, there was another knock on the door -- just enough proof to the logical part of our minds that the previous two visits were not random events, but part of some kind of emerging pattern -- what fans of Rupert Sheldrake might refer to as manifestations of the morphogenetic field, or what less metaphysical folks might describe as our very own "field of dreams."
Steven and I had done nothing at all to draw these people to us -- no ads in the paper, no posters on poles, no calls, no emails, no flyers, no social marketing campaigns. The only thing we'd done was immerse -- dig deeply into our own highly charged process of creating something new.
But this "nothing at all" wasn't nothing at all. It was something -- something grand and glorious. Something extraordinarily attractive.
Is a mother hen sitting on her egg doing nothing at all? Is she slacking? Is her seeming disappearance from the poultry marketplace a sign of irresponsibility?
To the casual observer, maybe that's what it looks like, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sitting is exactly what the mother hen needs to do in order to bring new life into the world. Stillness, not action, is her path.
Did Steven and I accomplish what we set out to do during our 30 days of immersion? Yes, we did. In spades. Beyond the inspiration, collaboration, and good feelings we experienced, we emerged with the design of our first product -- a creative thinking training we ended up licensing to AT&T just two years later for a truck load of money.
Was our immersion time all fun and games? No way. Chaos and confusion were our housemates, but the rent they paid sparked a ton of learning, creativity, discovery, and a new found willingness to make friends with the unknown -- what Henry Miller was referring to when he defined confusion as "simply a word we've invented for an order that is not yet understood."
In today's business world, immersion is a very rare commodity. ADD rules the day. Time is sliced and diced. We don't have time. Time has us. We tweet, we delete, we tap our feet, but all too often nothing much beyond the status quo ever really happens. Downtime has become an anathema -- the province of "B list" players. Busy-ness and business have become synonymous.
The assumption? The more we do and the faster we do it, the more success we'll have. Boil an egg? Ha! We microwave it -- even if it tastes like shit. Dive in? No way. We hydroplane.
But it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't.
Slowing down and going deep trumps speeding up and going crazy. Immersion trumps diversion. It's possible. Yes, it is. I have proof. And so do YOU, if only you would pause long enough to remember those extraordinary times when you unplugged, tuned in, and dove into your own process of creating something new and wonderful.
A QUESTION FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:
What can you do, this week, month, or quarter, to unplug from the daily grind and give yourself the luxury of immersion? Where will you go? When? And who will you invite to accompany you, if anyone?
Excerpted from my forthcoming book: WISDOM AT WORK: How Moments of Truth on the Job Reveal the Real Business of Life.
Excerpted from Storytelling at Work
MitchDitkoff.com
IdeaChampions
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2018The Return of Idea Champions Extraordinary Co-Founder!
Idea Champions is thrilled to announce the full return of Co-Founder, Steven Raymond McHugh to our roster of innovation consultants, trainers, facilitators, and change agents.
Steven and I (Mitch Ditkoff) founded Idea Champions 30 years ago and have delivered services to a wide variety of forward-thinking organizations since then. Bottom line, Idea Champions would not have materialized without Steven's brilliance, wisdom, energy, humor, vision, soulfulness and love of coffee. As far as facilitators of group process goes, he is in the 99th percentile of WOW. Tuned in, totally engaging, awake, and skillful beyond the norm. I have learned a lot from him and continue to do so.
Ten years after Steven and I started Idea Champions we decided to go our separate ways for a variety of reasons that were not necessarily reasonable at the time, but needed to happen. In the interim, we have stayed in touch -- as friends, fellow change agents, and referring sources. Now the wheel has turned and we are back in the saddle again -- a phenomenon of possible great value to you and your organization.
Phase One of Steven's return to Idea Champions includes the facilitation of two game-changing workshops and trainings for our clients: Seize the Future and Agile Leadership/Agile Teams.
If either of these interest you, feel free to call us at 845.679.1066 or email: info@ideachampions and Steven will get back to you within 24 hours to explore the possibilities. If you are looking to raise the bar for innovation, increase leadership capabilities, and get the collaboration juices flowing, this is for you.
Idea Champions
Our clients
What our clients say
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2018An Invitation to Forward Thinking Readers of This Blog
GREETINGS! Mitch Ditkoff here, author of this blog. I have just launched a GoFundMe campaign to create the support I need to write, edit, publish, and promote my next book on storytelling, tentatively entitled Storytelling for the Revelation. Click this link for more info and a simple way to contribute. Every little bit helps. Thanks for considering this and for being a Heart of Innovation reader.
MitchDitkoff.com
Idea Champions
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2018Want to Teach in a Wonderful Islamic School in Australia?
The forward-thinking Islamic school, in Melbourne, Australia, that I have been consulting with for the past year (Al Siraat College) has some new job openings for teachers in their Primary and Elementary schools. This is a great opportunity for an open-minded, committed, adventurous educator to make a big difference and have an extraordinary experience at the same time.
Click here for more info. And here, as well.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)
