5 Million Women Change Agents in 5 Years!
The Global Women’s Leadership Network has joined forces with others to launch a major effort in developing women and girl leaders around the world. They posted an open innovation challenge and are looking for fresh thinking on how to quickly build leadership capacity in women and girls. Their stretch goal is to develop 5 million women change agents improving our world in 5 years.
This is an important effort for many reasons. As they point out in the preamble to the challenge:
“There is a growing recognition that there can be no peace, security, or sustainable economic development without women’s equal participation in all spheres of society.”
You need to register with Innocentive and electronically sign an agreement to see the details of the challenge. I signed up as a solver and suggested an approach (copied below) based on knowledge cards and NewHabits.
I hope you too will take up the challenge.
Leadership Knowledge Cards for Women and Girls
Include tools on the platform to enable women and girls to author, share and use knowledge cards designed to master the skills and habits of effective leaders.
Background
Knowledge cards encourage action, experimentation and the learning from experience necessary to achieve behavior change and develop new skills. Each card (roughly the size of a 3×5 card) includes a title, a motivating quote, a single idea or thought and a single behavior or technique to practice.
A sample card is shown below.
This card teaches a positive influence technique based upon sharing emotions. The card’s title provides a simple description of the leadership technique to practice with and the motivation for doing so. The quote is an opportunity to build energy or refer to authority to strengthen motivation for using the card. The title and quote also reflect the attitude or value that stands behind the card. The THINK section lays out the basic idea or technique to be practiced. The DO section describes exactly what to try out. Knowledge cards tightly couple motivation, thought and action into a single concise micro-lesson designed to improve performance.
This card is one of many potential cards focused on the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership. Effective leaders are able to spot, assess and manage emotions in themselves and others. The knowledge card not only signals to women and girls that it is ok to show emotion but it teaches them how to use emotion for leadership effectiveness.
Now imagine many such cards not only about emotional intelligence but for communication, team building and all the skills necessary for being an effective leader. Women and girls could access such cards and play them on a daily basis to master the skills of leadership while they are effecting change in their organizations and communities. They can easily learn to author such cards and use them to share experience and advice with each other. Working together the network of women leaders could quickly author many cards on a wide variety of leadership topics at no direct cost. In this way, knowledge cards can be used to rapidly develop and unleash the leadership capacity of women and girls.
Proposed Tool for Platform
Include tools for authoring, sharing and using knowledge cards as part of the empowerment tools and “just in time” resources in the global library section of the platform. The functionality of the proposed tool is briefly outlined below.
- A web form that makes it easy to author a knowledge card. Authors would select a template and then type in the title, think and do sections. The platform would suggest a quote to include in the card as well as provide easy access to quote sites so authors could select their own. The tool would automatically find related cards. Key words could be applied to help categorize the card and link it to other content on the platform (e.g. case studies and stories). This would work much like a blog editor.
- Allow participants and institutional members to customize knowledge cards with color, graphics and by-lines.
- Participants can post a request for a specific type of card or deck to help them solve a problem or develop a specific leadership skill
- Participants can form on-line groups to work on specific decks
- Participants can browse cards visually by leadership skill category (e.g. active listening, influencing others, etc.) or by using a search engine. Cards of interest can be saved or bookmarked and configured into decks.
- Participants can download a card or a deck of cards for use on their smart phone, tablet or other mobile device. An app will be used to play, organize, manage and share the cards directly from the mobile device.
- The cards can be shared via email, Facebook, texting and other electronic means.
Example
I have implemented this approach in a graduate class on the foundations of leadership for the last several years. This involved training hundreds of students on how to write, share and use knowledge cards. Two thirds of the students (including emergent women leaders) that take the course have reported that knowledge cards had a high or very high impact on their learning.
We use Ning the social networking site as the platform for authoring and sharing the cards and the free iPhone and iPad App NewHabits for playing the cards from mobile devices.
For additional information see the Ning screen walk through and the NewHabits screen walk through.
Ning is a low-cost platform that scales and NewHabits will publish decks of knowledge cards for free or on a royalty sharing basis.
Meet the Challenge?
Knowledge cards provide an engaging and effective way to capture and share insights into the vital behaviors and skills of effective leaders. They provide a structure for participants to share advice with each other in a way that is both fun and optimized for learning and behavior change.
Groups naturally form around different leadership skills and topics.
Participants play a card daily from their mobile device to experiment with and eventually master a proven leadership practice. Cards are designed to fit into everyday routines and take minutes to use. These small improvements accumulate over time into significant new leadership skills.
In addition, leadership experts can author decks of knowledge cards and use the tool as a means to disseminate best practices.
