This week, in an effort to achieve the three outcomes for participants below, several of my colleagues stepped up to design and lead a variety of internal learning experiences.

• Outcome 1: Spend time with colleagues in a professional learning setting and with whom you may not normally get a chance to
• Outcome 2: Become more aware of the things happening in our organization and that colleagues (i.e. facilitators) are thinking deeply about
• Outcome 3: Find a few nuggets and tidbits which can be more immediately applied in one's own practice or extra-professional life

I asked someone to give me up to five 'irons in the fire'  - projects - that are part of his responsibilities at his main job. I also asked him to give me up to five side projects that are also in progress. Then I asked him to assess the progress of each on a scale of 0-4. I then generated the above sketch and sent it to him (a digital version and a physical poster for his office). The text is legible (blurred for privacy). Finally, I promised to check in with him each quarter on these things and update them and provide an updated graphic and poster.

Save time, serve talents.

Here is a pre-recurring meeting email format that I have found helpful for groups that meet once every 1 or 2 months, and with a group size of 10-15.

I'm finding myself more and more using the "schedule send" feature in Gmail to get things off my to do list when it is best for me, but to send the message on a date and/or at a time that might be better for the intended recipient. For example, I knew I was going to be off-site one day last week teaching a course at Columbia, but I wanted to send an email in advance of some other work happening that week. I could have sent it immediately after writing it (at like 5 am on a Monday), but instead scheduled for it to send at 9 am on a Tuesday.

I attended a terrific webinar facilitated by Jen Cort that explored some very practical and well organized ideas for more inclusive hiring. The point that resonated the most for me was about how to leverage internal communities when hiring (i.e. most schools post on traditional boards but don't necessarily ask parents, former colleagues, alumni to actively help/share in the recruiting process).

Today I wanted to share 5 different Google Docs with a team of colleagues. I did not accept the default where 'Notify people' is checked because this meant that team members would each receive 5 notifications. Sure, it might be helpful to have the notification emails to refer to in the future, but I decided to instead copy the URL of the shared document, uncheck the notify box, and then create a descriptive list containing all 5 documents in a single email. The intent here was to create a single point of reference for the things we ended up discussing in the meeting.

Here is an exercise that can be used in many settings. I used it as part of a leadership conversation based around how leaders job is to make things 'easy' for those whom they serve. Here are some guiding principles:

• If doing anything new (or any incremental change), start with something that is both simple and easy. 
• If working with a system or process that is already simple and easy, decide if it can be automated (computers are good at simple and easy things) or if it is better to add complexity without sacrificing the ease.
• If something is simple but hard, spend effort on making that simple thing easy.
• If something is complex and hard, don't reduce the complexity. Instead reduce the difficulty.
• If something is complex and easy, it's in the right spot.

As a strategic planning exercise, I was asked to watch and react to a talk by Ian Symmonds about some field work he had been conducting around emerging trends in independent schools. The video can be found here.  I made a sketch note as I was experiencing the talk (above).

Last June, Steve was sitting in the back of a crowded room. It was the end of a long day and he had been called back to this room by a slightly inexplicable item on an agenda. Laptop on lap, he typed next to several other people who were also typing into some device or other. No one noticed the tall, lanky man walk into the center of the room until he cleared his throat and called the room to attention. It soon became clear that he would lead the final session of the day’s meeting. Also, it soon became clear that the purpose of the activity he would be leading would be extremely unclear for most of the audience.  His subject was the ancient practice of paying attention to a process that many of us take for granted — our breathing.

“In a few minutes, after some more explanation, I’ll ask you to close your eyes — if you’re comfortable doing so,” he said. And then he talked to us about how we might sit and what we might do with our mouths (everything was couched in the conditional) and how it might be best to think of our thoughts, upon closing our eyes, if we chose to, as if they were clouds floating by. “You don’t judge the clouds, right?” He didn’t want us to judge our thoughts; he didn’t want us to name our mental clouds “good” or “bad;” he didn’t want us to be hard on ourselves if we could not focus; and he really didn’t want us to work on anything. Being. That is what we were supposed to be doing in the non-doing space he had deftly and surprisingly opened up for us that day.

For Steve, this impromptu meditation session was the most surprising thing that had happened all day, all week, and probably all month. He had not signed up for this, and it did not flow logically from the event for which he had signed up. He was at his school’s version of a tech conference. He had spent the day learning about Google Tools and backchanneling and Prezi and assessment. He wanted to try out the new tricks he had learned in a session on the latest Mac operating system (OS X Yosemite, at the time). He wanted, too, to respond to some emails that had been piling up. As he tried to settle into the guided meditation, begrudgingly at best, he spotted Reshan who had engineered not only the tech workshops but also this closing event. He wondered what Reshan was up to. Was this some kind of elaborate hoax? An experiment? As he thought to himself, he heard another voice in his head, chiding him: “You shouldn’t be pursuing that, or any, line of thought right now. The purpose is to focus on your breathing. The purpose is to stop focusing on the day’s work, the day’s screens, the day’s technology.” And then Steve knew exactly what was happening.

This meditation session was not solely, or even mostly, about meditation. It was about habits and default settings. It was a forced move away from hardware, software, and the networks that bind computing devices to other computing devices. Reshan wanted us to take a break — and not the kind of break that entails logging in to other social networks or email accounts to catch up on work between formal engagements.

The leader of the guided meditation said, “If your mind is filling up with thoughts, just let them go. Don’t chide yourself. Gently return your focus to your breathing.”
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Steve agreed — still feeling a bit foolish — to give this a try. When he started to think, he returned his focus to his breathing. A few minutes later, when the leader called the people in the room back to attention, Steve felt refreshed, as if he had just returned from a dip in a cool stream. Maybe there was something to this . . . maybe.