Learning Cafe Unconference Sydney 2014

This year’s Sydney Unconference’s theme was agility to relevance. There was a mixture of small group presentations and key speakers. All of the speakers were great and tied in their presentation with the key themes of relevance and agility. My personal highlight of the day was the MOOC activity in the afternoon. Patrick Crooks ran a fast paced and high energy workshop on how to get an idea up and running.

Making the idea process agile

We formed groups of six and then played a quick ‘break the ice’ game. Patrick ran us through a quick demonstration on how to make the starting up a project process agile by using a version of the Business Model Canvas that Fusion Labs tailored for the event. The idea was simple; how to give OH&S training to fly in and fly out miners operating heavy machinery. The business model canvas had seven steps but didn’t necessarily have to be completed in order. Any issue to hinder progress would be placed in a separate hypothesis section. For example our group decided we would make a video using women in bikini’s (the wow factor) and show as inflight ‘entertainment’. A hypothesis for this would be; that we are assuming all the workers are men. So we would put that aside and keep going with the idea process and then later think of ways to address the issues if the hypothesis is untrue.

Embrace failure

The process essentially works by doing, testing and then learning. Be unafraid of failing and learn from those failures. Because from those failures you can improve. The workshop demonstrated how Fusion Labs makes their start up process agile and how you could possibly implement a similar process into your own workplace and apply it to learning and development.