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Maybe I’m realising
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“Just keep doing the work” is a piece of advice that rubs me mostly the wrong way at this time of year. It’s the time of year when I feel like nothing I’ve ever done freaking matters. Writing this silly newsletter feels like a chore. I’m spewing words and work into the world and no one gives a toss. Hello, welcome to December.
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There are a lot of people, I call them “bullshitters”, who regurgitate ideas as if they’re their own. There are people who wag their jaws without saying anything, and these people often climb ladders and manage to assume powerful positions. This week I gave the advice to “do your own thing” in the face of incompetent leadership. We don’t have to play the same game others are playing.
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Part of being (a thinking) human is dealing with the (perhaps) recurring realisation that we won’t be privy to our own impact. We have no idea how much, where or why exactly we matter to someone else on this big blue ball. When you’re struggling under incompetence, reminding yourself of the things you’ve done and the care you’ve shown is a good way to take idiocy in stride.
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I’ve written it a thousand times – what we do matters. How we engage with people matters. How we spend our lives matters. Our existence causes ripples. The moon is hanging in place because you exist.
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Maybe I'm acting
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“Just keep doing the work.” That’s what they’ve been telling me. “They” the all powerful they. And so I do. Despite my general lack of motivation this time of year, I’ve been “doing the work”. At the moment, the work is a lot about returning to my roots in edtech. I’m pleased that the academic article I wrote in collaboration with Dr. Belshaw and Dr. O’Byrne has been made available (first link below). Interestingly, my colleagues don’t seem to mind that I’m not officially a doctor, nor, I think, will I ever be officially a doctor.
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The work has been about literacy, yes, and also creating equity and inclusion in the realm of recognition and credentialing. It’s been about changing the world. Helping people and society. Making things better. It’s always been about that.
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Next week, I’ll be speaking and running some sessions at the ePIC conference in Vienna. This year’s theme is “Open Recognition for a Sustainable Planet”. I’ll be talking about the role recognition plays in helping society work on the Sustainable Development Goals.
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For one of my slides, I added the step “activism” to a model I stole from the Engagement Support team at Greenpeace International. The model was meant to illustrate how people move through a pathway to become more deeply involved with the activist organisation. More broadly, it shows how engagement itself can lead to activism. It can be used to help organisations understand where their initiatives fall in a user journey, and it can reveal where user relationships fall down. It’s not a Marketing Funnel, though that may well have been an initial jumping off point. In any case, credit where credit is due, and the first I heard about these Stages of Engagement was eons ago at a Greenpeace meetup.
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Maybe I need help?
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Frankly the report-out style of newslettering that I’m doing now is something I do when I don’t know what to say. I don’t feel like I’ve been thinking deeply about anything much in the last weeks, just going through the motions and trying to figure out what, exactly, I’m supposed to be doing. Because really, the world doesn’t seem to be changing for the better, despite the time and effort we’re all putting in.
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I guess, we can be curious and content and comical in our skewed sense of pointlessness.
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