With a little help from my friends
Author: Wendy Elford Issue: 2022-04-06
“With a little help from my friends”
by Wendy Elford
I went for a job interview this week in the Australian National University School of Cybernetics and just wanted to reflect on the concept of tribe, and standing in your fear and accepting the gift.
The gift from the OGM tribe came from the “yes” I got in reply to a request to help me work through some of the options in preparation for a practical session part of the interview, “Teach Me Something”. I ran the interview session yesterday successfully. It had been immensely improved by lots of little inputs and many small gifts from others.
Reflecting on process, what was useful was several independent, smaller conversations to advance the concept; a running conversation on mattermost; and then a single Zoom conversation with a group of around five people. I was in Australia, they were in the US. None of the timing was perfect for any one of us contributing; there were also other people who contributed in smaller conversations, who are not part of this OGM tribe. These non-OGMers could easily join and contribute to our larger conversations.
Here is a YouTube link to the PowerPoint presentation: a short introduction to the practical session. Definitely shakey but finished just in time–I was virtually walking out the door at the time I did the voice over!
This preparation process, plus an exchange with a graphic designer, allowed me to quickly call on many ideas to put them into something that was appropriately short, respected people’s time, and to be confident that we would all be better prepared and was still an artefact useful to others not present.
The learning point? Never underestimate using fear productively and consciously as a point of self-learning and to receive the gift of feedback and ideas from others. The gift will readily be given, you just need to be vulnerable to accept it and what emerges from being vulnerable.
Tag line – “With a little help from my friends” as John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a hand in the session as well–and funnily enough ‘reimagine’ is the tagline for the College of Engineering and Computer Science where the School of Cybernetics is based!
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