Sam Barbee, Learning Pool
When one of the speakers talks about the padded headrests in the urinals of the Tower nightclub in Hull you know you’re not in your average local government meeting.
These are the sorts of words that, when mentioned during delivery of a busy customer briefing, can make the watching Sales Director’s blood run cold – for a few seconds anyway. I needn’t have worried.
Learning Pool’s newest team member, Community Evangelist Dave Briggs, had judged the mood of the morning well and with such a degree of polish that one member of our audience later asked me “Does he do stand up comedy in his spare time?” I must admit I wasn’t quite sure how to reply as it could easily be reality.
With hand on heart I can honestly say that delivering breakfast briefings to groups of councils is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.
All of us Poolies enjoy getting out and meeting our community and we are fortunate that our members love to share information about what they are working on with other public sector colleagues. Luckily it’s also invariably interesting.
Yesterday we were at Amber Valley Borough Council in Derbyshire (and thanks very much to Ian Shepherd for hosting) and we were joined by officers and councillors from Lincolnshire CC, Rushcliffe BC, Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire CC, Melton BC, Kettering BC, Kingston-upon-Hull council, Sheffield City Council and Northamptonshire CC.
The guys from Lincolnshire CC shared with the group, in a lively mock tv interview style, their plans to create a set of learning resources to support the council’s 24 corporate priorities. They also told the audience how using Learning Pool is helping them meet their objectives in this ambitious programme, Lincs to Learn.
Our stage stars were realistic about the challenges they face as they try to change the mindset of many of their 7,000 strong workforce and we marvelled at how clever they have been in using employee wellbeing as their first topic.
Michelle Hallam-Wrenn and John Day described for us how they have won senior management buy-in and endorsement and about their ambition to become an “e-mature” organisation. They explained the necessity of building good business cases to support their work and how important it is to constantly demonstrate return on investment to colleagues as part of the process.
This session came hot on the heels of headline news on local tv that morning about how neighbouring Leicestershire County Council (another LP customer) has announced that they will make £70m savings over the coming four years, and in an economic climate where announcements of this nature are being reported every few days.
Steve Thompson, Kingston upon Hull
Next up was Steve Thompson from Kingston upon Hull council who demonstrated how much benefit and value his authority has gained from using and re-purposing existing courses in the Learning Pool catalogue on a whole raft of topics ranging from health and safety to Gov Connect.
We reassured him that this is ok to say out loud and admit to in public – it’s what the catalogue and the authoring tool are there for…
Dave Briggs, Learning Pool
Last but not least was the aforementioned Briggster who, as well as reminiscing about joys of his student youth, scared us all to death with reminders about the pace of change in all things social media (can anyone seriously believe that YouTube is only 3 years old? And can anyone remember LBT? – Life Before Twitter).
Dave warned our group that unless the public sector embraces these new ways of working FAST, local government will fail miserably on various fronts – it won’t be able to attract and retain the younger generation of workers it desperately needs and it will miss out on all the positive benefits of using social media tools.
Dave shared with us his own fascinating journey from benefits office to No 10 Downing Street through the power of the blog.
The good news is that Dave’s team at Learning Pool is there to demystify and allay any fears newbies may have and to help authorities get to grips with all things social media. He even promises the inside track on how to best apply for some CLG funding.
Our three hours flew by this morning and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief when I realised that Dave wasn’t proceeding to tell the tale about his latest domain name registration - I’ll leave that one for another day and another blog.
Why not come and join us at our next breakfast briefing? They really are a lot of fun.
Mary
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I have to agree that getting out and meeting with all of you yesterday is the highlight of life in the Pool.
Sounds like it was both enjoyable and informative. I think that’s what they call edutainment.