A challenging view of leadership

I recently attended had the opportunity to attend a fascinating presentation on leadership. You know the feeling you get when a presentation starts and you realise that you are about to hear something very powerful  .... well this was exactly that. I sat and listened to a passionate and humble man talk about his life and his learning. It would be fair to say it was one of the most inspirational presentations I have heard. This gentleman held a captive audience in the palm of his hand while he told his story.

Ngahihi o te ra Bidois  presentation was based on his book entitled Ancient Wisdom, Modern Solutions.

He talked about leadership in terms of influence, by skillfully weaving this into his own life story

Through listening, looking & thinking we gain the wisdom to speak.... Leaders ask courageous questions....Through proverbs and people we achieve our purpose..... If it isn't broken .... fix it! Image if Apple thought that land lines were all we needed..... Identify your eagles - who has influenced you in past? .... Who will influence you in the future?

It was a privilege to listen to Ngahihi's story, an inspirational guide and challenge to leaders.

Making movies

Over the last couple of weeks I have undertaken a real learning journey. Technology enables us to communicate in more ways than ever before, in fact the choice is endless. New technologies and capability are continually evolving, so it is important to be aware of what is available and be very clear about what it is you want to achieve.

I have been wanting to develop some movies to promote the capability and capacity of a range of tools. I wanted to do this in a way where I could include the key information as text, provide an audio explanation and have some music playing in the background. Sounds simple ..... I know.... but the reality was somewhat different.

The first step of this journey was a posting by Richard Byrne 5 Ways Students Can Create Audio Slideshows. In this posting Richard highlighted - Narrable, UTellStory and three other applications. I explored Narrable first, but quickly realised that I couldn't have both the soundtrack and the audio. UTellStory is a quirky application to use and enabled me to create the exact type of presentation that I wanted. It was very user friendly and you could easily adjust the audio recording slide by slide, however, it was not easy to share with a large group of people. It can be embedded in a blog, but the organization that I was preparing the video footage for did not want this, they just wanted to share a link.

In the end, after lots of investigation, the solution was very simple. Create the presentation in Keynote, add the sound track and audio using the 'Inspector' tool, then export to Quicktime. When adding the soundtrack and audio, you need to upload the sound track first and then add the audio. Video clips can be shared easily via Dropbox. With larger videos it pays to save them as small or medium sized movies, otherwise you will exceed the capacity of your dropbox.

So hope my many hours of learning and investigation provide a short cut for you.

Scenario planning

I am still playing major catch up here.... but the course content looks so interesting that I am determined to find the time this week.

A brief overview of clarification and new learning to date. Scenario planning:

• is a metaphor of rich narrative designed  to help you consider alternative / potential futures
• provides an opportunity to explore how your present strategic decisions can / could impact on the future
• Scenarios are not predictions of the future, but mental models to gain a better understanding for decision making. Scenarios help answer the question: What will we do now, if that future were to happen? In other words scenario planning provides an opportunity to 'scope.'

The key elements for scenario planning are creative thinking and the use of qualitative subjective information. I would add open-mindedness, as I believe that you would have to be open to truly engage in the scoping aspect of scenario planning.

This slideshare presentation provides a brief overview of scenario planning and outlines a workshop process