The blog of Elena Menéndez
Archive for December, 2011
Collaborating on creative work
Dec 3rd
Last month I spent some time working on a creative project, with the aim of producing promotional materials to publicise the library at an upcoming Plymouth University event. Nothing particularly unusual there – this was within the realms of my fairly open role. What is interesting about it is that despite a really tight deadline and working with a group of very busy colleagues, the whole process went really well. This made me think that it would be worthwhile spending some time deconstructing what happened and seeing what lessons I can learn for the future.
The brief
To kick start the ‘task’ – I won’t call it project because we didn’t really have the time to go into proper planning – we had an initial meeting that involved representatives from each library team. The meeting was useful in understanding what was required, exploring some options and deciding that we’d produce some posters and a video or automated presentation. In other words, it gave us the brief for the work we had to do. As the group was large, and some admitted not to have an interest on getting hands-on with the design, a smaller sub-group was tasked with coming up with ideas for the posters.
The brainstorm
A snapshot of some of our workshop mindmaps
Three colleagues and I set out to brainstorm for a couple of hours. After ensuring we all were clear about the brief, we started exploring the topic we wanted to promote. I made a deliberate decision to take on the role of facilitator, even if it was at the expense of offering fewer ideas. My colleagues are closer to the service provision than I am and I felt they would have plenty to contribute. While they talked, I jotted down their thoughts and, depending on the situation, I asked questions to clarify, expand or focus their ideas. I also kept an eye on the clock so we had sufficient time to reorganise our thoughts and come up with a few concepts that would represent the message we wanted to communicate. I did have to work hard at staying in the ‘facilitator zone’ and every now and then I chipped in with my two-pennies-worth, but overall, it worked really well. Best of all, we came up with a concept that everybody liked and was a true collaborative proposition, the result of bouncing ideas off each other and then capturing the essence of what was being said. I think this was achieved by having someone who was keeping an eye in the whole picture – in this case that was me, though it could have been anybody else. I’m not saying that it couldn’t be done without a facilitator, but I think it would have been more difficult.
Putting it together
Now that we had our mind-maps and sketches, we set out to translate them onto paper. Due to the tight deadline, I worked on the poster drafts alone, but having the material from the workshop made my life so much easier. With the presentation we used a collaborative approach again, although this time in a sequential way: I set the original template and my colleagues enhanced it by adding more content.
Feedback, deadlines and editorial control
We sought feedback from the ‘briefing team’ after the brainstorm and before the posters were sent to print. There wasn’t time to hang about so we had to set really harsh turnaround times for comments. Despite their other commitments, most people replied straight away or shortly after receiving the feedback request. And the responses seemed to be very focussed, possibly because people understood we didn’t have time for many changes and they concentrated on what really mattered to them. There were some differences of opinion, but the ‘design team’ decided to only make changes to the proposal if the majority was in agreement. This allowed us to move really fast from that point on and get all the materials ready on time. Although we received good feedback from various sources, interestingly, at the end of the process we felt that even if the materials hadn’t been that successful, it wouldn’t matter so much. They were only ideas; we could use them today and ditch them tomorrow.
Lessons learnt
Promotional materials on site at the event - Image by Jason Truscott
So this is what I think I have learnt from the exercise:
- You need a brief and everyone to be clear about what it is. Very often people come to projects with different ideas or expectations. The library managers getting together and deciding what they wanted was a crucial part in the success of this task.
- Although I said earlier no planning was done, by that I meant ‘planning’ in project management terms. Clearly you do need to sort out a timeline and make sure everyone is clear about their role and deadlines.
- Creative brainstorms may not work with a large group
- Creative brainstorms work better with someone facilitating
- Deadlines focus the mind and help you and others concentrate on what is important.
- Work in beta – there are some lessons to be learnt from agile development. We increasingly work with fewer resources and more demands. We need to readjust our expectations and be able to deliver outputs that are not perfect, but they are good enough. I’ve been involved in this kind of work in the past, where drafts have been around for months. In this case, because there wasn’t time to mess around, we made ‘executive decisions’ and it worked. I wouldn’t recommend this approach for everything, but at the end of the day, a poster is just a poster. If people don’t like it, we can bin it and start again.
What next?
Obviously we don’t always have the opportunity to try things out and see what happens, but I really think we could be more agile in the way we produce content and resources. Something else that would have helped us to speed things up – and saved a lot of angst when trying to evaluate and act on the feedback received from colleagues – would have been to ask the ‘briefing team’ who had ultimate editorial control. It is quite frequent for projects and tasks in our department to have many stakeholders and/or sponsors. This slows down decision making and reduces the chances of a quick turnaround. Having a single person who is responsible for saying yes or no to a design, even if they take advice from others, could be a huge improvement.
I feel that it would also be useful to turn experiences like this into some guidance that people could follow when faced with a similar task. I’m certainly hoping that by sharing my thoughts with others, we can perhaps improve the way we handle creative work as a team.
Reflections of an analytic mind
Dec 1st
Some months ago I blogged about my take on reflective practice. Since then I have been doing a lot of thinking around the topic, mostly because I have started to put together my CILIP Chartership portfolio and demonstrating that I am a reflective practitioner is a key part of the process. After staring at several blank pages, wondering how to start writing reflectively I realised that, before I could go any further, I needed to get a better sense of what my reflective style is.
I reflect, therefore I am
I say this because ‘I know’ I have a reflective style. As explained in my previous post, reflecting comes naturally to me, and this has been confirmed by feedback from others, in various situations, both at work and in education. Whenever I take a learning styles questionnaire, invariably I come up as reflector-theorist-pragmatist in fairly equal parts – my activist is lagging well behind. Why then, am I finding it difficult to write a reflective blog? In part, I guess, it’s lack of practice but there is more to it than that. I started blaming it on the way my mind works and the way I have been trained to think like a scientist.
And then it just dawned on me that having an analytical mind doesn’t stop me from engaging in reflective practice, in fact, it should be quite the opposite.
Doing it like a boffin
Logging it: A lab book is one of the most important tools a scientist will use.
It seems to me that the social disciplines have claimed ownership of reflective practice, when in fact scientists do this all of the time. As a scientist, reflecting is a quick cyclical operation. Look back to those days in the chemistry lab. Following a procedure for an experiment, you were told to observe and write copious notes. What happens, can you explain the reaction? What would happen if you repeated it in different conditions? Can you improve the yield? This experiential learning – which also forms the basis of scientific research – relies heavily on reflective practice.
In my previous life as a research chemist I had to do this all the time and I learnt most of the key skills that still serve me well today: attention to detail, analytical and organisational skills, problem solving, and creative thinking amongst others.
The big difference between the pure science and social science approach to reflection is that the former works only with hard facts, whereas the latter is happy to bring in a subjective perspective. I think it could also be said that the reflective practice cycle in hard science happens faster and in smaller increments. That’s how I learnt to apply my analytical mind in the lab: observe problem, hypothesise solution, apply solution, observe reaction, prove or disprove hypothesis and continue this cycle until a theory could be established. By repeating this process it became, not just a way of conducting lab experiments, but also the way in which I operate and approach every learning experience.
Way forward…
There are good and bad news here. On the positive side, I think this reinforces even more the extent of my reflective nature. On the down side, it tells me that I have become so used to my own version of the reflective cycle, that it is difficult for me to externalise it.
What I think I need to do is follow this same process but slow it down so there is more room for the subjective observations to emerge. I also feel that I should not be afraid to use description mixed with my reflection. Much of the advice you get about writing reflectively says to avoid description and that has been worrying me, because I realise I do have a tendency to describe facts (that analytical mind again). However, taking a look at my old lab books, which are in a way the ultimate log, I realised that writing down the facts allows me to review them, draw conclusions and build solutions. Deep down, I’m always going to want something ‘solid’ behind what I say. It’s what makes me who I am, and if accepting that helps me to move forward and find my reflective writing voice, I think I may be onto something.
Can your social network replace a search engine?
Dec 1st
Last week I attended the CILIP CDG National Conference. The programme included a presentation by Phil Bradley on social media and why it is important to Librarians. It was a full-throtle, engaging talk explaining where social media is today and how its exponential growth is affecting the world of information. As always, Phil made very good points in favour of engaging with social media. We know this can be an issue for librarians, not always through personal choices, but because their organisations have decided that social media is BAD and should be blocked. Phil made powerful arguments for information professionals taking action and communicating the value of social media to their organisations.
One of these arguments was that social media have become the new way of finding information. Users no longer look for authoritative content on a company’s website, they expect the information to come to them via a combination of news feeds and recommendations on social networks. These may come directly from friends or as a result of the user’s browsing history.
I can’t possibly disagree with any of these points. However, what Phil said next gave me a lot of food for thought. Social networks (or rather the people that inhabit them) are not only replacing websites as authoritative sources, they are also taking the place of search engines as a way of finding information. I find this idea misleading and overly simplistic and this is why:
- I have observed people asking questions on Twitter and even asked some myself. Crowdsourcing information can be very effective, but the quality of the response depends on the subject of your enquiry and the appropriateness of your network. As with many things social media, I feel virtual and physical networks mirror each other. Tweeting “how do I make spaghetti carbonara?” will have a similar effect to turning around in the office and asking my colleagues. Obviously, going online increases my chances of getting a response, but the quality of the information I receive will always depend on how ‘expert’ my contacts really are. If you haven’t got the experts right, you may end up having to do a lot of filtering or even and worse of all, following incorrect information. It takes a while to develop a good network and, if like me, your job spans across various disciplines, you’ll need to include people from all these areas. Throwing random questions at them is likely to produce a lot of noise, in their direction and mine. For me, searching online for a carbonara recipe or looking at the cookbook on my shelf would be a quicker and more accurate way of finding the information I need.
- As an information professional, I feel I should always try and find an answer by my own means. This may just be a personal gripe, but I feel it is lazy to do otherwise. I’m often bemused by people going on Twitter and asking things like “does anybody know any good books on XXX?” Errr… couldn’t you have checked on Amazon? The information is already there. Also, much of the knowledge I need to do my job exists on technical lists, forums and wikis and the best way to find it is to use a search engine. Of course, if that doesn’t work, I would always try and ask those who may know, whether they are local or virtual contacts. However, there again, I would target a particular list or group, to make sure I get an informed response.
- Similarly, when I answer a question, particularly online, very often I’ll use a search engine somewhere along the line. I know there is a useful resource out there, but I’m not a walking encyclopaedia. Before I can send you the link I’ll have to Google it or search my Delicious bookmarks or whatever.
- Why should information professionals want to replace the search engine? By all means we – as any professional in any other area – should aspire to be experts in our field. That does not mean we have to have all the answers. As I said earlier, most likely we don’t and we’ve just used a search engine to find the link to that resource we were asked about. Search engines, like social networks are tools. What makes information professionals experts is their ability to master these tools and use them to meet the information needs of their users.
This is not meant to be a dig at Phil’s presentation. It was just one of many points he made and, I think the intention was good: to expose the importance of social media and encourage librarians to engage in social networks, even if it means having to sell them to their organisations. I just feel that generalisations like this may be harmful at a time when many people are confused about their role. Social media serve a very important purpose in enabling us to have, enhance and amplify conversations, to connect with likeminded individuals and to reach out to people on the other side of the planet at the click of a button. They transcend social barriers, they give a voice to multiple causes that would otherwise remain hidden. And yes, they are a source of information too, but replacing the search engine? I don’t think we are there yet. However, I would be very interested to see if anyone else has any other thoughts on the matter.