It was a simple tweet. It became something much better.
A couple of weeks ago a Twitter connection posted this after an ugly weekend in the U.S.
I liked that it had a warm, human sound to it, and that it opened a door to reflection, and if needed, a listening ear. We exchanged a few tweets about it, but it got me thinking about the idea of being human in the midst of social media.
I’d already begun this thinking process through an exercise in Julian Stodd’s Social Leadership: My First 100 days. On day 12 we were considering what were our rules for how we will act and I came up with these:
I’d also attended The Great MFL Debate on the topic of emotional intelligence. The debate question was: Do leaders need to know what their team had for breakfast? For me the abiding idea was the importance and value of the human connection in the midst of delivering business outcomes.
I tweeted the bookweek one at 3am. My brain often processes things when I’m sleeping and brings them together and if I want to get back to sleep I have to get them out of my head – so I had Jane’s post, Julian’s activity, the debate outcomes and our house was in manic preparations for a bookweek festival at my wife’s school (she’s an English teacher so books are a given) and what came together was a small social media/learning experiment.
I led the way by posting my response to the question (also using images, as these have a stronger connection in memory than just titles).
Over the 24 hours following this tweet, my organic impressions jumped to over 2000! For everyone who responded, I liked and replied to their response (SM rule 4). 48 hours later, the dialogue had slowed down. We ended up with this list of 2017 L&D must reads (which I call a booklog – it’s like a backlog … of books to check out), a bunch of fun flashback moments and shared history from Pippi Longstocking and Trixie Belden to Asterix, Choose Your Own Adventure (the original branching scenario!) to Narnia and Fantasy worlds, Hardy Boys to Greek school books to The Very Hungry Caterpillar!
As an intentional more-than-just-a-tweet exercise, I was more-than-happy with the outcomes!
I feel a stronger human connection with those who engaged and we’ve delivered a hopefully useful reading list, curated through shared expertise and interest.
If you’d like to add your responses I’d love to hear them, on Twitter or through the comments. I’ll add your suggestion to the reading list below:
https://www.amazon.com/Working-Smarter-Fieldbook-September-2010/dp/0557689783 @PatPhillips
https://www.amazon.com/Social-Leadership-Handbook-Second-ebook/dp/B01HK25RKS @NeilVonHeupt
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seeing-Eye-Professionals-Alignment-Kettleborough/dp/B00V1ZWVNW @LearnKotch
https://www.amazon.com/slide-ology-Science-Creating-Presentations/dp/0596522347 @sean_riordan66
http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/books/edtechrations/ @ryantracey
https://www.amazon.com/Innovative-Performance-Support-Strategies-Development/dp/007170311X (@MattGuyan)
https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Set-Curate-Learning-Experts/dp/156286940X (@iDesignTraining)
https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Human-Performance-Technology-3rd/dp/0787965308 (@ActivateLearn)
https://www.amazon.com/Show-Your-Work-Jane-Bozarth/dp/1118863623 @JaneBozarth
https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210 https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/0452288525 @bschlenker
https://www.amazon.com/Working-Out-Loud-better-career/dp/0692382399 @MichelleOckers
https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 @DebThompsonVO
