Reflections from DevLearn 2015 Day 2: Sense Making, Curiosity and Sharing

I’ve been producing a video diary at DevLearn this year, trying to extend my #WorkingOutLoud to a process of continuous reflection. I’m recording short, one minute videos and uploading through the day. It’s reasonably time intensive, but forces me to think and commit to action: it’s a personal narrative that gives me a legacy and some challenges. Is it any good? Who knows: that’s the point of working out loud. You learn what works and what doesn’t!

So this process, plus the other interactions through Twitter and in real life have given me my three themes from the conference today: sense making, curiosity and storytelling.

Sense making is the process of figuring out what we believe: what will we take away from these events, what will we discard, change our beliefs on, adopt or challenge? It’s both an internal activity and a group one. Through the web of conversations that surround the formal sessions we sense make and, once we’ve done that, we should share our stories.

This type of reflective #WorkingOutLoud is one way, but there are others: i see teams huddled together, sharing what they’ve learnt from the different sessions. The thing about storytelling is that it’s iterative: we don’t have to get the story right first time. The trick is to start it and see where it takes us, so the story is not fixed and static, but rather iterative and evolving.

And, at the heart of this, curiosity: these events, at their best, are about being curious. Sampling new ideas, sharing new thoughts, challenging the status quo. If we get that right, if we are curious, try to make sense of it, and share our stories, it’s worth the trip.