Heliotrope

Québec English School Boards

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:06:18 +0000

Six Impossible Things

admin — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:44:52 +0000

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.”Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”"I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Dire Need: Business Team Collaboration

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:52:04 +0000

New Study: Lack of Team Collaboration Despite Knowing Better

ESI International, the world’s leading project management learning company, today announced the findings of a new study conducted to determine how successful organizations are in eliminating barriers to team collaboration such as hierarchies, silos and the wrong combination of training. The survey was conducted among industry professionals from the commercial and government sectors throughout Canada from late August to early September.

Based on the survey results, there is a wide gap between the idea of collaboration and the reality. In the current business environment, organizations should have an even greater incentive to support collaboration.

Unlike people working within traditional hierarchal roles and responsibilities, team-oriented collaboration brings with it greater agility to solve problems, improve processes and foster innovative thinking.

The findings show that, while the majority of organizations value high-impact team collaboration, less than 1 out of 3 organizations actually provide the proper framework for it. As a result, the skill gap widens while business performance suffers. Almost 81% suggest that poor communication lies at the heart of cross-team collaboration failure.

The study’s major findings determined that:

The majority of organizations, in fact, do not work collaboratively, despite the value that they realize would come from better teamwork.
Rigid work structures exist within companies that keep people from working together.
Organizations are not investing in the right mix of skills training needed to improve collaboration on projects and initiatives.

While 65.5 percent of respondents believe that their organization’s project performance would improve if their teams worked more collaboratively, only 27.8 percent actually do.  ”Businesses and public sector organizations have a proven best practice in using collaborative teams to drive improved performance and attain numerous other benefits, but the study results show the majority aren’t taking advantage of the approach,” said Glenn R. Brûlé, CSM, CBAP®, Executive Director of Global Client Solutions, ESI. “Organizations that continue to conduct business in silos will be left behind.”

Turning Collaboration Theory into Practice

The study validates the increasing need for business skills such as leadership and critical thinking amongst organizations today. Further, it suggests best practices for building collaborative teams such as more autonomy within projects, tearing down organizational roadblocks and providing the right mix of business and technical skills. These efforts can lead to more collaboration, better project/initiative outcomes and, ultimately, higher overall business impact.

The first step is to offer team members the right training for a balanced set of business and technical skills. To further ensure that teams attain their greatest potential, organizations will want to follow established best practices for collaboration, including:

1) Model collaborative behavior, starting at the executive level.

2) Develop unique relationship-building practices customized to your business environment.

3) Ensure employees have the skills of collaboration.

4) Support a sense of community.

5) Assign leaders who are both task- and relationship-oriented.

6) Build on existing relationships.

7) Assign distinct roles to team members

To download the full study, “Tearing Down the Walls Blocking Collaboration and Better Business Performance”, please visit: www.esi-intl.ca/teamcollaborationstudy.

Survey Methodology

ESI International conducted an online survey of eight close-ended questions to project management and business analysis directors, managers and staff, and other professionals in Canada involved with their organizations’ projects. The survey respondents represented sectors including, among others, government (32.3%) financial services (18.4%), IT (18%) and telecommunications (5.6%). The survey was conducted from August 23 – September 6, 2011. The number of respondents who took the survey was 895. Not all respondents answered every survey question. The survey was anonymous unless respondents wanted to receive the results, in which case they had to complete their contact details.

About ESI International

ESI, a subsidiary of Informa plc (LSE: INF.L – News), helps people around the world improve the way they manage projects, contracts, requirements and vendors through innovative learning. In addition to ESI’s more than 100 courses delivered in more than a dozen languages at hundreds of locations worldwide, ESI offers several certificate programs through our educational partner, The George Washington University in Washington. Founded in 1981, ESI has regional headquarters in Toronto and Washington. To date, ESI’s programs have benefited more than 1.35 million professionals worldwide. For more information visit http://www.esi-intl.ca/.

PM: Bridging the Divide

admin — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:18:54 +0000

ABOUT THE TOPIC

Projects require collaboration. How individuals interact impacts the outcome. Breaking down individual bias and building mutual respect is key to the result. Project managers must be able to lead teams of highly diverse people with different skills. Finding a universal language and toolkit to facilitate this process is an ongoing challenge, as each project is a unique combination of individuals and circumstances.

A project manager must create a team spirit at the start. This is key to early success. Otherwise, lack of mutual understanding can bog team members and a project down. Lack of motivation, commitment, and willingness to associate with the new project are additional challenges a project manager and team face.

Kim Liegel will share a new tool she’s discovered for project managers that helps bridge the divide between individuals. More specifically, this involves an interactive group learning game called Prelude. Prelude helps foster creativity, communication, collaboration, and appreciation for diversity. It’s been called a trust accelerator. Moreover, it’s fun to play.

Pre-registered attendees will be provided with a complementary online access code to play the first Prelude game module, called Keynote. Ideally attendees can play Keynote in advance. It requires about 25 minutes. Attendees will also have a chance to play the second Prelude game module, called iTag as well. There are four module activities in all. This will be a fun way to learn about and experience an important new PM tool.

All pre-registered attendees who complete the first step online and bring the printed result to the meeting will be entered into a drawing for $5 gift card prizes.

Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop or tablet for online access to Prelude during the interactive game play.

About the Presenter

Kim Liegel, PMP, and author of Make It Happen! Project Success has more than 20 years of experience, including program and project management for companies such as Garage Games, Symantec, Oracle, Snap-on Tools, and Nike. Additionally, she has delivered project management training nationally and internationally to high-tech corporations and non-profit organizations. Ms. Liegel is principal owner of Liegel Enterprises, LLC, providing project management consulting and training services to small businesses, non-profit and public agencies in the Pacific Northwest since 2003. She is past-President of the Eugene PMI Branch of the Willamette Valley PMI Chapter, and served on many of the board positions since co-founding the branch in 2004. Kim is also past-VP Communications of the international PMI Education & Training SIG, supporting project management educators worldwide. She has presented on a range of project management topics locally as well as nationally, including the PMI North America Congress in 2004 and 2007.

Partner – Dr. Howard B. Esbin is the creator of Prelude and founder of Heliotrope, a social enterprise. Howard has over two decades of senior management experience in international development, philanthropy, and the private sector.

Kim Liegel, PMP, and Dr. Howard B. Esbin have joined forces. They offer their complementary learning resources to interested educators and project managers. The goal of the partnership is to support the virtuous circle developing between students, educators, and the workplace.

Quebec Prelude Workshop

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:14:34 +0000

English School Boards Professional Day

For: Administrators, Teachers, Counsellors, Psychoeducators, Consultants

Date: THURSDAY JANUARY 26, 2012

Time: 9 am to 3 pm

Location: Lester B. Pearson School Board Office, 1925 Brookdale Ave., Dorval, Que. H9P 2Y7

Cost: FREE with online registration

Overview: Prelude is a group learning game. It helps foster student self-awareness, communication, collaboration, and appreciation for diversity. It also helps reduce conditions for bullying, disengagement and dropping out. Prelude is an easy project to take on, as all lessons are already organized and all materials are provided. Easy-to-learn. Fun-to-Play. Transformative.

TO REGISTER: http://www.123contactform.com/contact-form-HBE-259691.html

Make It Happen!

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:17:53 +0000

Partner Spotlight

Kim Liegel PMP, author of “Make It Happen!” and Dr. Howard B. Esbin, creator of Prelude, are joining forces. They want to offer their complementary learning resources together to interested educators and project managers.

“Make It Happens!” outlines practical engaging ways to introduce successful Project Based Learning in the classroom. Prelude is a learning game to use at the start of team-based activity. It helps team members to build trust and to better appreciate their combined skills and assets at the start of a project when this is crucial. Offering both “Make It Happens!” and Prelude together will provide double impact and value for teachers and students.

The goal of the partnership is to support the virtuous circle developing between students, educators, and the workplace. For more information, please stay tuned for Liegel and Esbin’s upcoming White Paper – Virtuous Circles: Learning & Livelihood In the 21C.

Pioneering Piloters Welcome: Teachers and Project Managers are invited to pilot both the book and game together. For more information, please contact info [at] heliotrope [dot] ca.

Happy New Year

admin — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:56:36 +0000

Once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose

~ Frederick Hoyle, Physicist, 1948 ~

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/12/02/science/20111202-planetscapes-24.html

Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood

admin — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:09:56 +0000

Thanks to TalentSmart for a wonderful white paper on how in 1969 Fred Rogers addressed the Senate for six minutes and ensured $20 million in funding for PBS, which had been in serious question. The Senator leading the hearing was known for his impatience and gruffness. As the video below reveals, Rogers’ pronounced social and emotional skills made all the difference.

“Anyone who is authentic and emotionally intelligent can use this to have great influence over others. When used to influence others, emotional intelligence requires knowing your strengths and your present emotional state (self-awareness); knowing how to manage the moment you are in (self-management); knowing what’s important to your audience and how they’ll perceive your message (social awareness); and knowing how to forge a connection with decision makers (relationship management). These skills can be developed individually through simple practice.” Jean Greaves, Ph.D.

It’s worth comparing the video of the original hearing and that of Mr. Rogers many years later singing his song on PBS. What an inspiring life arc. What a human being.

What Do You Do with the Mad that You Feel?

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite?

When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…

And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?

Do you pound some clay or some dough?

Do you round up friends for a game of tag?

Or see how fast you go?

It’s great to be able to stop

When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,

And be able to do something else instead

And think this song:

I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time.

And what a good feeling to feel like this

And know that the feeling is really mine.

Know that there’s something deep inside

That helps us become what we can.

For a girl can be someday a woman

And a boy can be someday a man.

Bullying & Suicide

admin — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:02:02 +0000

The following is from a CTV news report about the suicide of a 15 year old girl, Marjorie Raymond, in Quebec. This was the result of three years of bullying at her high school in Ste-Anne-des-Monts. The report also looks at another school and how it is responding with its own anti bullying program. Laval Junior High School first piloted Prelude last year. It was used again this year. Although not mentioned by name, what’s shown is the ‘Elemental Wall’ game component. This helps students better understand their individual and collective strengths . In turn this helps students trust and respect each other more.

Our Mirror Neurons

admin — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:58:57 +0000

Article: Lea Winnerman, APA Monitor on Psychology

“You’re walking through a park when out of nowhere, the man in front of you gets smacked by an errant Frisbee. Automatically, you recoil in sympathy. Or you’re watching a race, and you feel your own heart racing with excitement as the runners vie to cross the finish line first. Or you see a woman sniff some unfamiliar food and wrinkle her nose in disgust. Suddenly, your own stomach turns at the thought of the meal.

For years, such experiences have puzzled psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers, who’ve wondered why we react at such a gut level to other people’s actions. How do we understand, so immediately and instinctively, their thoughts, feelings and intentions?

Now, some researchers believe that a recent discovery called mirror neurons might provide a neuroscience-based answer to those questions. Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action. They were first discovered in the early 1990s, when a team of Italian researchers found individual neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys that fired both when the monkeys grabbed an object and also when the monkeys watched another primate grab the same object.

Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, MD, who with his colleagues at the University of Parma first identified mirror neurons, says that the neurons could help explain how and why we “read” other people’s minds and feel empathy for them. If watching an action and performing that action can activate the same parts of the brain in monkeys–down to a single neuron–then it makes sense that watching an action and performing an action could also elicit the same feelings in people.

The concept might be simple, but its implications are far-reaching. Over the past decade, more research has suggested that mirror neurons might help explain not only empathy, but also autism and even the evolution of language.

In fact, psychologist V.S. Ramachandran, PhD, has called the discovery of mirror neurons one of the “single most important unpublicized stories of the decade.”

But that story is just at its beginning. Researchers haven’t yet been able to prove that humans have individual mirror neurons like monkeys, although they have shown that humans have a more general mirror system. And researchers are just beginning to branch out from the motor cortex to try to figure out where else in the brain these neurons might reside.

The first study

The discovery of mirror neurons owes as much to serendipity as to skill. In the 1980s, Rizzolatti and his colleagues had found that some neurons in an area of macaque monkeys’ premotor cortex called F5 fired when the monkeys did things like reach for or bite a peanut.

The researchers wanted to learn more about how these neurons responded to different objects and actions, so they used electrodes to record activity from individual F5 neurons while giving the monkeys different objects to handle.

They quickly noticed something surprising: When they picked up an object–say, a peanut–to hand it to the monkey, some of the monkey’s motor neurons would start to fire. Even more surprisingly, these were the same neurons that would also fire when the monkey itself grasped the peanut.

The researchers found that individual neurons would only respond to very specific actions. A mirror neuron that fired when, say, the monkey grasped a peanut would also fire only when the experimenter grasped a peanut, while a neuron that fired when the monkey put a peanut in its mouth would also fire only when the experimenter put a peanut in his own mouth.

The researchers wrote about their unexpected finding in a 1992 paper in Experimental Brain Research (Vol. 91, No. 1, pages 176-180). Four years later, in a paper in Brain (Vol. 119, No. 2, pages 593-609), they dubbed their discovery “mirror neurons.”

“We were lucky, because there was no way to know such neurons existed,” says Rizzollati. “But we were in the right area to find them.”

From monkeys to humans

Once the researchers identified mirror neurons in monkeys, the next step was to look for them in humans. But they couldn’t record activity from single neurons in humans the way that they could in monkeys, because doing so requires attaching electrodes directly to the brain.

Instead, the first human mirror neuron study examined hand-muscle twitching. In a 1995 paper in the Journal of Neurophysiology (Vol. 73, No. 6, pages 2,608-2,611), Rizzolatti and neuroscientist Luciano Fadiga, MD, PhD, now at the University of Ferrara, recorded motor-evoked potentials–a signal that a muscle is ready to move–from participants’ hand muscles as the participants watched the experimenter grasp objects. They found that these potentials matched the potentials recorded when the participants actually grasped objects themselves.

Since then, most studies on the human mirror-neuron system have used some sort of neuroimaging, generally functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI). For example, University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, MD, PhD, used fMRI to image the brain activity of college-student participants as they watched experimenters make finger movements and as they made the same finger movements themselves. In the study, published in Science (Vol. 286, No. 5,449, pages 2,526-2,528), Iacoboni and his colleagues found activity in some of the same areas of the frontal cortex and the parietal lobule in both situations.

The difference between the imaging studies in humans and the electrophysiological studies in monkeys is one of scale, explains psychologist Christian Keysers, PhD, who studies the human mirror-neuron system at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

“When we record signals from neurons in monkeys, we can really know that a single neuron is involved in both doing the task and seeing someone else do the task,” he says. “With imaging, you know that within a little box about three millimeters by three millimeters by three millimeters, you have activation from both doing and seeing. But this little box contains millions of neurons, so you cannot know for sure that they are the same neurons–perhaps they’re just neighbors.”

In other words, although researchers have found evidence of a mirror system in humans, they have yet to prove the existence of individual mirror neurons outside monkeys. That’s why, Keysers says, it’s important that researchers continue to study the mirror system in both monkeys and humans.

Moving beyond the motor cortex

All of the original mirror-neuron studies examined monkeys and humans as they performed actions and watched others perform actions. There’s a good reason for that, says Keysers–the motor areas of the brain are some of the most well understood and well mapped, so it’s easier to know where to look for particular neurons there.

But some of the most interesting questions that mirror neurons raise can’t be answered by the motor neurons alone–researchers want to understand how we perceive other people’s emotions and sensations, not only their actions.

Keysers and his colleagues are investigating just those issues. In one recent study, he and neuroscientist Bruno Wicker, PhD, used fMRI to look at the emotion of disgust. In research published in Neuron in 2003 (Vol. 40, No. 3, pages 655-664), they imaged the brains of 14 male participants as the participants inhaled noxious odors–such as butyric acid, which smells like rotten butter–and as they viewed a film of an actor wrinkling up his face into a disgusted look. The researchers found that both feeling disgusted and watching someone else look disgusted activated a particular segment of an olfactory area of the participants’ brains called the anterior insula.

In another recent study, also published in Neuron (Vol. 42, No. 2, pages 335-346), Keysers and his colleagues looked at “tactile empathy,” or how we experience the sight of others being touched. He found that the same area of the somatosensory cortex was active both when the 14 participants–this time both men and women–were lightly touched on the leg with a feather-duster-like contraption, and when they viewed pictures of someone else being touched in the same spot.

“The basic thing we’re trying to do in my lab is to get beyond the original motor description of neurons to a more general phenomenon–how we perceive the touch, emotions and pain of others,” Keysers says.

Other researchers are interested in whether mirror neurons respond not only to other people’s actions or emotions, but also to the intent behind those actions.

“You might pick up a teacup because you want to take a sip, or because you’re clearing the table,” says Marco Iacoboni. “The question is whether mirror neurons can tell the difference.”

In a recent study published in PLOS Biology (Vol. 3, No. 3, pages 529-535), he and his colleagues found some evidence that they can. The researchers used fMRI to examine 23 participants as they watched videos of a hand picking up a teacup. In one video, the teacup sat on a table amid a pot of tea and plate of cookies–a signal that a tea party was under way and the hand was grasping the cup to take a sip. In the other video, the table was messy and scattered with crumbs–a sign that the party was over and the hand was clearing the table. In a third video the cup was alone, removed from any context. The researchers found that mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and other brain areas reacted more strongly to the actions embedded in the tea-party context than to the contextless scene.

“This suggests that the neurons are important for understanding intentions as well as actions,” Iacoboni says.

Take all these lines of evidence together, and it seems clear that mirror neurons are one key to understanding how human beings survive and thrive in a complex social world, says neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, MD, PhD, one of Rizzolatti’s colleagues at the University of Parma.

“This neural mechanism is involuntary and automatic,” he says–with it we don’t have tothink about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know.

“It seems we’re wired to see other people as similar to us, rather than different,” Gallese says. “At the root, as humans we identify the person we’re facing as someone like ourselves.”"