So one of the things I’ve been doing recently is doing a massive revamp of this website. You can’t see what I’ve done as it’s all ‘behind the scenes’ as I cleaned up a whole heap of plugins and also fixed up the database which was corrupted which created no end of problems for me over the years. (Big thank you to WPRunner who have been helpful in fixing these and my constant tech requests).

The truth is, after putting ‘on hold’ my Activate Learning Solutions consulting business pre-COVID due to lack of interest because people may not have valued helping their people and organisations learn techniques and practices that enable learning within workflows, post-covid, it’s an entirely different matter….but some things have changed.

Mainly, my mindset.

It’s as if the jigsaw puzzle fell into place and people finally understood what I offered. (I’m okay with this because I realised that my offerings were ahead of the game. It wasn’t what the market needed back then because it wasn’t seen as a priority. Certainly what I was offering was more of long term behaviour and mindset changes and not ‘quick wins’ which were what everyone was asking for.

Lesson learned.

Nevertheless, I decided to remove certain sections to this blog namely around my consulting services and also my paid resources. The latter need a bit of a revamp because looking at it, they’re slightly out of date. I seemed to have a more job or performance outcome whereas I realised the stuff that I love to focus and explore are more around the personal learning. That is, I think learning is personal and as such just because you’re in your 9-5 job, I didn’t want to focus learning to be on just that because people usually take an arms-length view when it comes to professional learning and development – they do it because:

• They have to (mandatory, compliance or role based training)
• They get paid to do it (sometimes although this is less which also means there’s even less motivation to do it)
• They’re expected to keep up by their employers

But they’re not personally invested in it (that is, their hearts and minds are really elsewhere).

I like the hearts and minds stuff because if someone is internally motivated to improve their thinking and learning no matter how much teams like Learning and Development jump up and down or their managers telling or threatening them about their development, really, they’re wasting their breath.

It’s fair to say that many organisations think of their people as numbers. As resources. As job fillers. Not as people with goals, desires, feelings and motivations.

I mean look at this tweet. This personifies everything that is wrong with organisational learning.

We’re all hanging on by our fingertips and I’m getting “mandatory mental health training” messages? Feck off. pic.twitter.com/7ij90wNxtk

— Dr. Dermot Lynott 🇺🇦 (@DermotLynott) January 26, 2021

So I removed a whole heap pages and resources related to things that simply focused on the job because I felt that I’ve now moved mentally away from this.

Organisations need to be helping their people BEYOND the job, role and task and looking at ways to help them become life long learners so they can help build or make better societies.

The work I’m doing at Adopt & Embrace for a few days a week is helping me see this. We are a B-Corporation which also adds that extra layer of social responsibility to what we do and making me question a whole heap of things about how organisations value their people.

Regardless, this site has been morphing a bit.

Certainly, I’ve been spending more time on it blogging and showing and sharing my work and learning – along with my YouTube channel. In fact, I’ve morphed both sites to be less about ‘selling the services’ (the old Activate Learning) to the new transformed site which is my ‘Learning Activation’ meaning it’s where I’m doing all my work and learning out loud.

It’s my work-in-progress. It’s a curation and collection of my thoughts, videos, photos, articles, ideas (I’ve decided I’m not going to split my work and my projects across multiple social networks which is the reason you’re probably seeing more of my own photos and projects on Twitter). I’m not splitting myself into multiple platforms.

What you see is what you get.

As I deleted and deactivated all of the social media and photo sharing sites accrued over the years, I’ve decided that the two main sites to keep and from which everything stems from is THIS blog and my YouTube channel.

Everything else is irrelevant for me now. I’m focussing on the sense-making and the creating side of the equation. I’m focussed on the bigger picture on the role organisations play in helping develop their people to become lifelong learners and to help solve complex societal problems – not just their day to day work and routines (which lets face it, will be changing as technology automates much of it).

2021 is going to be a year for me where I toss aside old thinking pre-covid – old actions – old things – old networks and old ways – and yes, even old friendships and relationships that never had my own best interests at heart or the ones I didn’t trust.

I’m going back to more meaningful and deeper connections with people I know, like, love and trust and doing it away from social media but behind the scenes in online calls, direct messages, one-on-one and physical meetups.

I’m also deliberately not exploring anything new media because the principles are the same regardless of the method used but I don’t want to jump into the bandwagon and compete for attention because regardless of what tool you use, the principles around:

• respect
• communication
• co-ordination
• empathy

are still relevant and you can do these in any way, on any technology and on any platform.

So no TikTok, no Clubhouse, no new online groups or communities unless I have worked with them previously and we have a mutual respect, acknowledgement and support of each others work.

I’m also revisiting the idea of Dunbar’s number to have a group of more meaningful relationships in my life.

It’s time to start afresh and look forward to a new and transformed way of thinking that will prepare me for the next phase of my life and which will bring in people who value the same.