The What Goes Around Blog

Filling In The Gaps

I’ve been investing a lot lately, in you and me, in us. I’ve made the slightest tweak to my Twitter bio and I’m using it…

Credo. Together beats apart. Flow beats worklife balance. Productive beats busy. Connection gives us meaning, conversations are the bond.

…and my most recent seven word autobiography as guiding lights. Sometimes the lights are dim, sometimes bright. Sometimes the lights take an orderly direction, sometimes they meander.

I grow increasingly certain about uncertainty, increasingly confident about vulnerability, and the vitality of momentum is not lost on me either.

A blank page is both an excitement and a challenge. Will that first mark land in the right place? I was doodling as part of my curation role at the CIPD conference this week, and I made many mistakes. The first one bothered me. Uncertainty and vulnerability. Grrr! The second and subsequent mistakes turned out to be guiding lights on the way to something I was happy to share. As I realised this – things flowed more easily. Momentum.

2014 is nearly upon us. So far there is meaningful, useful, exciting work in the What Goes Around diary for January. February. March. April. And there is room for more, and there will be more.

I am thankful and encouraged. In being encouraged, I hope in some small way I am encouraging too.

Guiding lights. Blank pages. Filling in the gaps.

Conference Doodling

I was doing some voluntary work for my professional body, the CIPD yesterday. My job was to create and curate content at a social media conference. As part of my work, I had a go at some sketching using pencil and fine liner pens. Here are the results.

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I had hoped to do more but I’m not skilled at doodling at speed!

Neil’s Journey

Yesterday I did some voluntary work for the CIPD. I was at their Social Media in HR conference doing a little blogging, doodling and curating, most of which you can see over at the CIPD tumblr site. An interesting mix of words and pictures emerged through the day, including this fascinating map of a journey by Neil Usher.

Neil was part of a pre-lunch panel discussion about ‘My social media journey’, or as Neil called it, ‘How I got off my arse’, and he chose to support his short talk with this diagram. You can click the image to see a larger version.

I thought this was an interesting way to support a story, using one diagram rather than a bunch of slides. I’ve not seen a story told with a backdrop like this before yesterday and so I asked Neil if I could share his idea with you. He kindly agreed.

I hope you find this little post useful and who knows, maybe the next time you feel the temptation to go nuts on PowerPoint, you might try something a little different too?