Share
The last step (hmmm… it’s not actually the last as it’s a circular process but you know what I mean) in the Maker Movement cycle is ‘Share’.
This is a really key behaviour for the success of the Maker Movement and it was whilst I was pondering this, and thinking about how to best describe this topic, that perhaps it doesn’t sit cleanly within the Maker Movement model.
So although I’m going to restructure the Maker Movement a bit I thought that for this blog post I would split the content and focus on the sharing aspects today. Other parts I’ll add to a follow up to the Communication post, and create a new ‘Psychological Safety’ section.
Anyway… More on that later… Back to today’s blog post! ‘Share’
So why do we want to share? What are we trying to achieve?
Let’s think back to the ‘Value Hypothesis’.
We’re sharing stories, successes, impact, people’s amazing actions, because we we want to grow the number of community members of people who are aware of the platform, of what it can be used for and achieve, and by who, in order to increase the number of Makers, which will then increase the number of solutions made and problems solved, and through these the amount of Solution Value, People Value, Organisation Value, and IT Value, to the organisation.
So how do we think about sharing? Let’s break it down using the picture of the Maker Movement.
Firstly we can consider sharing internally to the movement…
Our goal is to share into our community to enable our members to:
Learn more about the platform, it’s uses, and how to use it
Build their capability through sharing resources they’ve found, challenges they’ve encountered or overcome, and supporting each other
Build connections across the organisation and break down organisational silos through people from different countries, business units, or teams together.
But we also want to share externally to our movement through various communications and celebrations to drive adoption. Let me explain a section at a time:
Leaders - We want to share examples of leadership excellence where they’re enabling the organisations strategy through our platforms. A couple of ways of doing this are by sharing stories of people in their organisation and the amazing things they’re doing, by sharing stories of how they’re encouraging their teams to also use our platforms, and by sharing statistics and data showing comparative adoption and value. This may also drive competition amongst leaders which can be a motivator too.
People - We want to share broadly to the organisation to encourage potential makers to start their journeys too. We want to share stories on how others are using the platform to transform their roles to make them more interesting, and that they’re getting recognition for owning their own development.
Educate - We have an opportunity to connect with the Learning and Development organisation to share our approach, share our content, and share our ambition to get guidance on using the L&D platforms to create learning pathways.
Solve Problems - By sharing our message and stories with Enterprise Architects and other Technology platform owners we can highlight examples where the platform can be a valuable part of the strategic IT landscape and roadmap of the organisation.
Celebrate - Sharing successes and stories of our people with groups like senior leaders (to show how their teams are transforming themselves, their processes), HR (to show how we’re supporting capability building).
Share - Building relationships with superstars in communications will give you help to connect into how things are messaged and connected into strategies. They can help you define comms plans and tell your story.
In all of these cases what we’re trying to identify are the Win-Wins which benefit our stakeholders and the platform enablement and adoption.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post as I was reflecting on ‘Share’ and how to best describe it I evaluated the topics and content and decided that there was actually an opportunity to simplify the model and break out some of the content into another ‘enabling’ section. Here’s a sneak preview of the new view!
