Community

Community matters.

Know this, feel this, believe this.

Make something happen.

Photo c/o Doug Shaw. An extract from the spring 2011 #connectinghr unconference visual minutes by Creative Connection

I’m helping to grow #connectinghr – will you?

This photo is a view of our garden in the early Spring. You can see the old shed and some of our apple trees bursting with leaves. I enjoy growing things, it is enormously satisfying. Growing fruit and veg, growing business, growing community.

On May 5th the #connectinghr community will get together for our second unconference. I will be helping to disorganise things. The full details are here and it would be great if you could join us. Why should you? I would like to share a couple of feelings about the last one which I hope will resonate with you.

In October 2010 I attended the first #connectinghr unconference. It was the kind of powerful community event that I really enjoy. I went along with one objective: to share. And I benefited enormously from it. I picked up loads of ideas, and the event inspired me to write and perform a little song, on the spot. That last sentence says a lot to me about inclusion, involvement and encouragement. I felt sufficiently confident to experiment. When was the last time you went to a meeting of new minds and dared to be different? In the moment.

I was and still am hugely grateful for the support of the #connectinghr community. And I want to help it grow.

Will you?

some of our garden produce — Jam, onions and garlic are among the many things we grow and make from our garden. We have more than we need and enjoy sharing with friends and neighbours.

ConnectingHR – Encouragement Rocks

So what would make someone pull out a guitar and try singing a song he’d never played or sung before, written just an hour or two earlier? Did someone say stupidity? Seriously folks – the answer is simple (not stupid). The answer is encouragement.

I was privileged to get myself down to the latest ConnectingHR tweetup last Monday. There was a great party atmosphere and I enjoyed catching up with some familiar faces and was excited to meet new people too.

I tried putting off the inevitability of leaving I was enjoying myself so much, but Southern Trains waits for no man. On went my coat, I picked up my guitar bag and went to leave. “Surely you’re not going without a song for us?”. And the next thing I was surfing a wave of encouragement and massacring a version of Johnny Cash’s 25 minutes to go, rewritten for the HR community.

Encouragement is very powerful stuff. When I get together with folks in the ConnectingHR community I get a sense of a great movement being co-created. It’s fun, inspiring and I believe this community is really starting to help folks to make work better. Who would have thought that HR could be such great fun? Brilliant!

Thanks to Julia Davies for holding and shaking the words. Thanks to Martin Couzins for shooting the vid. There are some great pics from the evening on his blog too.