Buffet of Life

It has been a very busy time the last 3 days - reading, listening, asking, then reading more and understanding this creature called LAB. I spent almost all of yesterday ploughing through the LAB participant website (like a programme LMS cum noticeboard), and the GLD shared drive. A buffet of material on everything concerning the programme - contracts, design discussions, logistics, marketing, facilitation guides, evaluation forms and summaries, reports, notes of meetings, speaker invites and bios, prototype binder for print, admin flow, presentation materials, background readings etc... thankfully, these are areas common in running any kind of programme, so not too hard to navigate. After a while, I got the hang of it and pulled out stuff which I thought would be useful later.

Going through all that material, my impressions of the journey they have taken in the 8 months leading up to this point are:

• Holistic approach to design - what needs to happen before participants come together; what should happen during; and what needs to happen after.
• Guiding rigour - I was amazed by one of the design discussion documents I came across. It was replete with all kinds of learning theories and models they surfaced to use to undergird the programme sessions; it was also filled with various types of conversation methods & models they employed to guide their own internal design team discussions. For a schema nut like me, it was plain heaven!
• Brave use of technology - I still find it hard to believe that they have put all the materials and information for LAB online, the only other form of communication being email. I think the greatest motivation for this is the fact that the participants are scattered all across UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Plus the fact that the 3 modules happen about 3-4 months apart from each other. Still, using technology so pervasively on a group of Deputy Secretary-equivalents is not a choice of the faint-hearted. Haha, but I have heard that on this count, they face similar problems as us - that the real people reading and preparing the materials are the executive assistants (PAs)! :-p

I was fortunate to be able to catch Tim for lunch today - as the project manager for LAB, he is in the hot seat and overwhelmed up to his ears at this point (we leave for Toronto tomorrow morning; part of the team has already gone ahead to meet with the site visit hosts and programme facilitators).

We went to this fabulous place just round the corner from the office. Marcellos @ 99 Bank Street. It has a generous buffet line with all sorts of sides, mains and desserts. What you do is grab a styrofoam takeaway container, go round the line and fill up with what you want, then pay according to weight. After doing that, pick a seat indoors next to a water feature, or a place in the sun, al fresco, and enjoy!

Tim is probably leaving the School after this project. Heading to the Canadian Foreign Service Institute. E-learning is his first passion, and he hopes to return to doing that kind of work after all this time with the School. We had an honest conversation about the difficulty of doing the leadership development work that the School does (and likewise, the College). It takes patience, perserverance and positivity to keep at a mission where you have to constantly justify the resources you pump in; agonise over articulating the outcomes you can produce; patiently wait for the results - and at the end, perhaps never really know how much of those results can be attributed to the things you have done.

The Canadian system is such that there is equal competition for all jobs, regardless of your scheme of service. What people do here is to apply for available positions, and sit for a combination of tests and interviews for selection. There is a similar system for getting promotions. So Tim is an example of how a learning professional can move through countless places across and within governments (federal, provincial, municipal), as long as there are vacancies. His is about the 3rd story I have heard so far about people self-rotating through portfolios, steering themselves towards current Directorships.