The chapter Lighting the Spark in Zanders book, Art of Possibility states that passion rather than fear is the igniting force of possibility. He discussed how the practice of enrollment is about giving yourself as a possibility to others and being ready, in turn, to catch their spark. You become partners in a field of light. I have experienced this many times through use of enrollment, getting others to see the light, through my passion verses using manipulative means to engage them. Allowing them to see your passion gives them different perspectives thus unleashing possibilities that they would not otherwise have seen. I am passionate about incorporating what I call the fun factor into my corporate training courses where my French colleagues culturally oppose this.
 |
| Fun training materials - Photo taken by Laurie Kish |
 |
| Photo taken by Laurie Kish with permission |
I prepared a training course on Project Management that I intended to release world wide to all our global sites that involved an interactive team building pirate adventure where they were required to dress up as pirates and journey across the open seas with the mission to find the treasure within a specified time-line, specified cost, and with a certain performance measure. I presented this to my French colleagues just prior to launch and the mere idea of this seemed childish and they closed their minds immediately. Of course fear ran through my soul and I felt attacked, and defeated after spending many weeks developing this module. I decided to show them how passionate I was about learning effectiveness when hands on fun activities are integrated into the modules by convincing them to participate in a session to experience it first hand. They agreed and in the end I opened up my module for their critique and comment and asked them to help me improve it so it was culturally acceptable to the French. By doing this, I could see the light in their eyes as they engaged in helping me add more fun factors. They were sold and to this day they often contact me to help them incorporate other fun examples into some of their training sessions. The sparks of possibility are living within all of us; we just need to imagine that all people and situations can be an invitation for enrollment.
Dear Laurie, getting to know you this past year through our course work I can tell you have been practicing Zanders’ idea of “enrollment” in your life. The way your enthusiasm and wonderful ideas have helped bring teammates along in our projects has been evident and I can imagine your work environment allows you flexibility to be your authentic self. It becomes a “win-win” situation when we are able to bring others on-board with our ideas in a fun way that allows creativity to be at the forefront. I’m sure your family embraces your creativity, how lucky they are to have you in their life. I look forward to meeting next month and getting to know you better. I also love the graphic you included about “Team Effectiveness” from an earlier project we did. The little baby remind me of our infancy when we began this EMDT program and now look at how much we have learned--wow it has been an amazing journey. Thank you for a wonderful post.
ReplyDeleteThe graphic I made reference to is from your post to Tiffany--way to showcase wonderful work from our previous coursework. :-)
ReplyDeleteHi Laurie,
ReplyDeleteThis is really amazing! I love that you didn't get discouraged when others weren't "on your page." This story is rather inspiring to me as sometimes I have an idea and I feel like the more experienced teachers at my school would think I was crazy...for lack of a better term! I think after reading this chapter and your experience I could "get them on board" well maybe have more courage to try to "get them on board" Thanks so much for sharing!