#my 9 to 5 is down an employee so ive been picking up the slack im real tired after work havent worked on this in a while 😬

[alitgblog]

for the record I see the notes on this and like bold of yall to assume I have the perseverance to write

that being said here's a wip

like my idea is just to draw highlights / scenes I like from scott pilgrim instead of plotting out the whole thing so it's not gonna be a full blown comic but just a few drawings here and there

let's hope I don't lose momentum on it (...again.... I started this a month ago 🤣)

so i came up with a rough idea for a scott pilgrim inspired litg au where you have an evil ex from each season (minus season 8 since it's coming out now)

Bobby would be the main character, which I didn't want at first because he's the most popular LI but I think his personality seems the most likely to get into this situation (minus the Scott Pilgrim being an incel but that's why it's inspired and not a one to one). Also works since he's in a band.

Obviously MC is his dream girl (Ramona in the movie). Could probably have Noah be his roommate, who is bookish and also a little sick of his problems. Then you have the other band members: Lottie is the drummer (who is also Bobby's ex who's still a little mad at him), idrc who the guitarist is lol, and then I think it'd be funny to have a character who wants to be in the band but they don't let him until the end and that should be Felix.

The stuff about Knives I understand is important to the Scott Pilgrim story but I'm not a huge fan of the "dating a high schooler" part lol. Still, we can have a character that he's dating who's all in and he is not but he doesn't have the heart to break up with her and ends up breaking her heart anyway, and that's probably Hannah.

MC shows up to his concert and then you meet the first evil ex, Dylan. And MC is like oh they dated for a week in middle school and after she broke his heart, he kind of became the asshole we know him as now. (the only reason I'm picking Dylan first is because I think Matthew Patel is one of the more cringe exes and I just simply couldn't do that to anyone else in s4, plus after the exposition he just gets thrown away anyway).

Next, Bobby, Noah, and MC all go visit a local movie set and they see her next ex, Rafi. I don't know why I always picture Rafi with his like weird smouldering face, but that honestly works well with this character, if you've ever seen pictures of Chris Evans in this movie. Because there's a skateboarding aspect in this, I did consider it should be Jamal, but for the bit I already picked a s6 character so it had to be someone else lol.

Anyway, Rafi gets defeated by his arrogance and then Bobby's band is playing in a contest, where he sees his ex and her new band mate/boyfriend, Mason, who is also MC's ex. As for Bobby's ex, it doesn't matter too much but I could see it being Yasmin since she's also a singer, Priya because she canonically is a fan of Mason's band (i think?) and there are routes where she's initially coupled up with Bobby, or Elisa because I think on some s2 routes she goes for Bobby but also I just like her aesthetic compared to this character in the movie. Also I just think either of them look good next to Mason (maybe they don't fit personality wise but they'd look good)

So Mason gets defeated, probably not with the vegan thing (but if we switch Mason for Levi, I could believe that), but something silly other than physically beating him. Next ex is Bonnie, who is clingy as hell. I don't think we should keep the part where Ramona calls it her like college experimentation stuff because that's not a great stereotype, but I kinda like the idea that Bonnie thinks they were in a relationship and had something but MC is like, no, clearly not.

The next exes are the twins, and so I had no other choice than to make this Ozzy and Marshall. I also think MC probably drove them apart and then when they finally compared stories they finally became friends again and are out for vengeance. Anyway, they get defeated.

Last but not least, the ex to rival all exes, the titular character of s5, we have Suresh running this shit. He is so hung up over MC that he set up this whole league. Literally nothing about his character would make me think he'd do this (because this character in Scott Pilgrim is so malicious actually), but he is the "ex in the villa" so he's gotta be the final boss.

[creativesage]

(via From Building 21st Century Skills to Enabling People to Develop Ceaseless Curiosity) 

By Rotana Ty

On Building 21st Century Skills

"How do you teach people to be more comfortable with ambiguity?”

My response was: “The first thing we need to do is give them projects to do where we can’t know what the right answer is in advance."

"(...) The projects were life-changing for many of us involved with them. I think a big part of why is that the level of uncertainty was so high – it forced us to try new things, to learn (a lot!), and to grapple with ambiguity head-on. Both the learning outcomes for students and the commercial outcomes for clients have been fantastic."

"(...) The way we pitch it to students is: if you look at that list of 21st Century capabilities, and agree that they are important, this is the best way to build them.

Will it work? I don’t know – we’re learning ourselves as we build this. But to me, if we don’t offer opportunities like this, we’re not doing our job.

It’s forcing me to be more comfortable with ambiguity too. Which is exciting, and scary. Just like everything else that’s worth doing." — @timkastelle

What We Have Enabled & Learned

In a previous project, we also taught students and workers to embrace not knowing and uncertainty by giving them projects such as running their own webinars — privately and publicly. It was part of a six week learning program for upskilling them on 21st Century skills (complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and emotional intelligence).

Here is below what our Global Upskilling Program looks like:

What & How

6 ­weeks duration - 23,5 hours (total)

Coaching (Group and Personal) ­

Access to 21st Century Skills Video Courses and 21st Century Skills App (that we created)

‘Learning By Doing’ assignments including:

1. Building a team of three people - in person and remotely by getting to know each other, via collaborative and communication tools.

2. Doing a personal live webinar — Topic: dealing with uncertainty

3. Starting and engaging on public social networks

4. Doing a group live webinar — Topic: Having a conversation about one of the Substainable Development Goals.

Content

Part I: Learning the basics of 21st Century Communications

Part II: Assess and improve your 21st Century Skills

Part III: Team Building, Collaboration

Part IV: Being a Global Employee

Part V: Being an Ambassador for your company

Final Part: Determining next steps

Somehow, the level of uncertainty was high for students, workers and us, too. Even we prepare them and they prepare themselves, they and we didn't know if they will succeed in terms of resonance of their insights, interactions with their audience and usages of communication and collaboration work tools (Google Suite, Google Hangouts and Slack) with other team members for their small project / personal or group live webinar (20 minutes talk, 20 minutes Q&A, 10 minutes for feedbacks from the coaches of the learning program).

Each participant of our learning program had the challenge of:

Being a speaker (facilitation)

Being a writer (content)

Being a coordinator and communicator (logistics, promotion)

Being a participant (conversation)

With this simple real-world exercise and through our learning program, they learned many 21st Century skills, rather than only one skill. To map the 21st Century skills they developed, we provided them an online tool / table for doing so based on 48 skills, that we organized in 2 types (inner skills and outer skills) and in 10 categories:

Observing

Communicating

Leading

Building the Future

Learning

Working with others

My inner world

Relaxing

Dealing with challenges

Sustaining myself

And it was also a way for ourselves to be comfortable with ambiguity, as it was the first time we were enabling and supporting people to develop and improve themselves through bunch of personalized and supportive learning experiences and work practices.

Now, is there another way of seeing wich emergent skills individuals need to develop and practice in an augmented and automated world? Are the ones suggested by the World Economic Forum already outdated or irrelevant?

Work Skills for the Postnormal Era

Stowe Boyd suggests other work skills for the postnormal era.

"I think the World Economic Forum (WEF) — or their contributors on the report, Till Alexander Leopold, Vesselina Ratcheva, and Saadia Zahidi — are at least five years out of date. I think the set of skills they list for 2020 are the sort that CEOs and HR staff would have picked for new hires in 2010, or even 2005. I don’t hear the future calling in this list. Here’s my table of skills, which also serves as a TL; DR if you are in a hurry:"

"First of all, let’s state explicitly that we’re talking about skills that are helpful for operating in the wildly changing world of work, and note that I make no distinction between the skills needed by management versus staff. That is an increasingly unhelpful distinction, as the skill set will make clearer, perhaps.

Here are some alternatives to those listed by WEF, which we’ll call postnormal skills. With the exception of Boundless Curiosity, they aren’t ordered by importance, although I bet for different domains they could be weighted profitably."

So why each skill in that table needs to be developed and what does each look like in practice?

"1. Boundless Curiosity

In a world that is constantly in flux, dominated by a cascade of technological, sociological, and economic change, the temptation may be to shut our eyes and close our ears. However, the appropriate response is to remain flexible, adaptable, and responsive: and the only hope for that is a boundless curiosity."

(...) I believe that the most creative people are insatiably curious. They ask endless questions, they experiment and note the results of their experiments, both subjectively and interpersonally. They keep notes of ideas, sketches, and quotes. They take pictures of objects that catch their eye. They correspond with other curious people, and exchange thoughts and arguments. They want to know what works and why."

So, what does your learnability look like?

"2. Freestyling

"As AIs and robots are expanding their toehold outside the factory floor, we are all going to have to learn how to play nice with them. Or, maybe said better, to use them to augment our work."

(...) We have to learn to dance with the robots, not to run away. However, we still need to make sure that AI is limited enough that it will still be dance-withable, and not not-runnable-away-from."

How do you embrace a possible collaboration between humans and machines to augment yourself and your work?

"3. Emergent leadership

The second most critical skill is … emergent leadership. Not the title, not a degree in management. But the ability to steer things in the right direction without the authority to do so, through social competence."

"4. Constructive uncertainty

In effect, Ross is suggesting that we slow down so that our preference and social biases don’t take over, because we are deferring decision making, and are instead gathering information. We may even go so far as to intentionally dissent with the perspectives and observations that we would normally make, but surfacing them in our thinking, not letting them just happen to us. The idea of constructive uncertainty is not predicated on eliminating our biases: they are as built into our minds as deeply as language and lust. On the contrary, constructive uncertainty is based on the notion that we are confronted with the need to make decisions based on incomplete information. More than ever before, learning trumps ‘knowing’, since we are learning from the cognitive scientists that a lot of what we ‘know’ isn’t so: it’s just biased decision-making acting like a short circuit, and blocking real learning from taking place."

How do you go fast and slow for navigating knowledge flows?

"5. Complex Ethics

Complex ethics are needed to jumpstart ourselves, and to consciously embrace pragmatic ethical tools. As one example, Von Foerster’s Empirical Imperative states we should ‘act always to increase the number of choices’."

"6. Deep generalists

So we have to adopt the winning strategies of the two classes of living things: those that are specialists, deeply connected to the context in which they live, and at the same time generalists, able to thrive in many contexts.

We can’t be defined just by what we know already, what we have already learned. We need a deep intellectual and emotional resilience if we are to survive in a time of unstable instability. And deep generalists can ferret out the connections that build the complexity into complex systems, and grasp their interplay."

How do you embrace diversity, generalism and specialism?

"7. Design logic

"So postnormal design logic jumps the curve from dreaming up things to build and sell, to using the logics of user experience, technological affordance, and the diffusion of innovations in a more general sense, in the sense of envisioning futures based on our present but with new new tools, ideas, or cultural totems added, and being able to explore their implications."

"8. Postnormal creativity

"Creativity was not quite ‘‘normal’’ in Modernity, if we are to believe the popular Romantic mythology of tortured geniuses and lightning bolts of inspiration. We should therefore expect that in postnormal times creativity will have a few surprises in store for us. In fact, creativity itself has changed, and in postnormal times creativity may paradoxically become normal in the sense that it will not be the province of lone tortured geniuses any longer (which it was not anyway), but an everyone, everyday, everywhere, process." - Alfonso Montuori

"9. Posterity, not History, nor the Future

"(...) We should instead cultivate the skills that come from reflecting on posterity, the future generations and the world we will leave them. ‘Posterity’ implies continuity of society and the obligations of those living now to future inheritors, a living commitment, while ‘the future’ is a distant land peopled by strangers to whom we have no ties."

(...) We need to colonize the future ourselves, we must make our own maps of that territory, maps that show us as inhabitants and inheritors, making new economics, breaking with the deals and disasters of the past, and committing again to each other: to be a community and not consumers, to be partners and not competitors, to be from the future and beyond the past.

Maybe I should call myself a posterity-ist instead of futurist?"

"10. Sensemaking

We need to nurture the ability to create flexible models to derive meaning from a set of information, events, or the output of our AIs, and determine a course of action."

How do you derive meaning from data, events, systems, humans and machines, and actions?

Stowe Boyd also said in the end of this post:

"I offer these with this coda: I don’t think these skills are being taught, generally, or at least not in any sort of systematic way. At some point, the inevitability of these skills may change that. There’s a small cadre of agitators (I include myself) shouting out that the times are a-changin’, but I don’t know how far our voices carry, or if others can understand our words.

I’m reminded again of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, the source of the name of my new research and consulting practice, Another Voice:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.  — TS Eliot, Little Gidding

Perhaps this is proof, once again that we need new ways to think about — and talk about — this rapidly changing world: we will have to find another voice.

Maybe that’s the eleventh skill."

The Importance of Teaching Curiosity in our Modern World

As I wrote in this blog post:

We are heading towards a world where humans work with machines (including machine learning / artificial intelligence, robots and automated systems). Humans would need to create better insights and ask the right questions to create possible solutions for solving problems. But for doing, one needs to develop curiosity and the capacity to ask questions through habits, people, experiences, and resources in an augmented and automated world. That is our strong belief with Angela Dunn, @blogbrevity @HealthisCool. We are currently working on that. Stay tuned!

This is a take, that I am currently having and exploring to enable and support modern professionals to make the most of and learn from all kinds of experiences and opportunities to self-improve and self-develop.

What if we could enable people to develop their ceaseless curiosity like curious creatives do?

“He [Karl Lagarfeld]’s permanently filling himself with independent culture and establishment culture, so basically he knows everything, and he’s like a sampling machine.” Lady Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeld’s “muse,” concurs. “He said to me once, almost in a worried way, that he has to find out everything there is to know, read everything,” she says. “The curiosity is ceaseless.” - in the New Yorker

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it on the Synchrodipity blog, and to view additional images.]

***

You’re working on your goals, and your team’s goals. We can help you spring into action and develop a real plan that you can implement in a smart way, so you’ll start seeing results immediately, before you feel discouraged. If you feel that you’ve already gone off-track, we can help you get your focus, courage, and motivation back.

At  Creative Sage™, we often coach and mentor individual clients, as well as work teams, in the areas of change management, building resilience, making personal, career or organizational transitions — including to retirement, or an “encore career” — and facilitating development of leadership, creativity and collaboration capabilities. We also work with clients on work/life balance, focus and productivity issues.

We guide and mentor executives, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, artists, and creative professionals of all generations, to help them more effectively implement transition processes, and to become more resilient in adjusting to rapid changes in the workplace — including learning effective coping techniques for handling failure, as well as success. We work with on-site and virtual teams.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your situation. You can also call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley. Let’s talk! An initial exploratory phone conversation is free. When you talk with me, I promise that I’ll always LISTEN to you with open ears, mind and heart, to help you clarify your own unique path to a higher vista of success.

              ~Cathryn Hrudicka, Founder, CEO and Chief Imagination Officer of Creative Sage™, Executive Coach, Consultant, and Mentor.

***

[jessicer-mcnfisc]

No, i dont have experience owning any business, but ive been theorizing for years and i have worked in businesses like the ones i want to start. They ran a small cafe, but their main income was orders for cakes. THEY HAD LIMITS ON HOW MANY ORDERS COULD BE DONE IN ONE DAY. There were maximum of x orders they could do every day, and its just a little too bad for the customer if they cant get in on that day, even if it was a holiday. Because they didnt think of how many orders they could get/money they could make, they thought of how many orders can realistically be filled by 1-2 people per day. If i have 1 employee and myself, over 8 hours we can maybe do 5 orders each, plus maybe some prep for the next day totaling about 12-14 orders over 2 days. I dont care if its Christmas, or Thanksgiving or Mothers day (easily the biggest day in bakery sales of the year). The place i worked also had a policy of no day-of orders unless it was already in the bakery case. You needed to give 24 hour notice for a custom order.

Ive also worked in places that ran the kitchen at full capacity with half the staff because they had a full wait staff. I worked there for 5 months and then the stress got to be too much and i left, but in those 5 months we never had more than 10 people in the kitchen meant for 16 people as a skeleton crew (including chefs and covering the whole day), but they had a full wait staff so they ran the restaurant at full capacity, while taking online and delivery orders, and that was at its best. At its worst, we would have 4 people in the kitchen over the entire day, because they all worked doubles. Most weeks i worked 3 double shifts, open to close (9-8 or 9 or 10 with an hour break). Then the holidays hit and i had a mental break and couldnt get myself to go back.

My point is that in my experience, smaller businesses care more about their people than their profit. They didnt overwork their people because they were only open 5 days a week for 8 hours because they had an actual bare bones crew and didnt want to overwork them because they dont have other locations to pick up the slack through the rough patch.

I can name at least 4 restaurants in my area that are chains and have been closed down for a year due to lack of staffing, but they still pay the lease because they are a part of a corporation who keeps them open so they dont lose the real estate. Ive received job offers from those restaurants for management positions that pay less than what im making now working under management. High schoolers working at mcdonalds make more than what theyre posting for management. Theyre not paying a living wage. If i was living by myself, there isnt an apartment within 15 miles of here that would be cheap enough for me to live in by myself. Ftlog, my bf works security at a government contracted ammo plant and he isnt armed or trained (outside of his previous national guard training), nor is he paid a living wage. Together we can afford a small 800 square foot apartment, which theyre charging a lot for because they got bought out by a rental company recently and they remodeled some of the units and have washer/dryer in the unit (which is such a blessing).

Didnt really have a conclusion and then it turned into a rant, sorry. I grew up in a middle class family in a huge house with generous parents. They always let us do what we wanted for hobbies, sometimes even did them with us, and hell my parents let me live at home and lent me a car to drive while i was in college, and if i couldnt work during the time i was in school they paid for the gas. My parents were super generous people and i hate that i took that for granted for so long, because they had 4 kids all with different and expensive interests to the point that my mom was working a second job, on top of being a full time special ed teacher and my dads 6 figure work from home income. Now im living in the situation where when i go see my dog at their place sometimes i steal some bread and peanut butter because i cant afford it myself, or maybe they have some frozen veggies that i can have and then maybe i get a vegetable that week. Honestly cant remember when i last had fruit, or protein that wasnt from work, which means it was 3 slices of ham or bacon as part of a breakfast sandwich. For gods sake i cant afford milk, instead i buy those mio things (i call them squirties) for the same price and i drink those with with tap water because on its own its gross. Or maybe some cokes expired at work and i get those.

My point is that everyone wants workers who can do everything (and what sucks about me is i love learning new things and im fast at it so im like every employers dream so they usually overschedule me on multiple stations because im capable) but no one will pay a living wage. I love my job, and i actually took a $2/hour pay cut to go back to that company, but i dont think people in management quite get how hard their inferiors have it in the other areas of their life (and when they take away the free food, a lot of them dont end up eating at all).

i honestly think that the reason that the whole "staff shortage" thing still hasn't been resolved is because employers legitimately aren't trying to remedy it.

like as this "shortage" drags on it seems less and less like a natural phenomenon and more like excuse for employers (especially large employers like grocery store chains) to see just how few people they can have in their stores and still make money. like this pandemic has given them the perfect opportunity to see just how shit they can make the customer experience while still turning a profit

and when you look at it that way, the countless stories of people being denied jobs that were supposedly in DESPERATE need of filling totally make sense! because even if your store has ten-person lines at every cashier, if it isn't hurting your bottom line, why would you care? businesses are finding out now just how much that they can get away with before losing business, and it's WAY more than they previously thought