Do you remember the story of »The jar of life«? A professor taking a big jar and filling it with different size stones, sand, and a bottle of beer? And who of our guest bloggers studied mathematical systems and modeling? How much do you ‘trust yourself and others’ that you know the correct answers? We collected this year’s Knowledge Hub stories for you before we break for the summer and meet you again in September.

The first half of the year was special for us. We hosted the first guest bloggers under a new category ‘Learning Insights’ in our Knowledge Hub. There they shared their reflections on learning, our collaboration and more. Together we created twelve blog posts: three on webinars, change management, leadership, social media, etc., all connected to learning. It was a powerful way to understand the different insights that we all have.

Source: https://balancedaction.me/2012/10/17/the-jar-of-life-first-things-first/

Which story do you remember the best? The first important point comes from the metaphor knowledge absorption used by Sanja Pregl, training manager from the Bank of Slovenia and CEF coordinator. When writing her reflections on finding treasures in people, she reflected on the “jar of life” – “By filling up the jar we create another miracle: we can then teach other people about things that we know very well, while we lose nothing. Quite the contrary – by sharing and teaching we learn too and find space in our jar for new wisdom. It is like love: the more love you have, the more you can give, and by giving love it only grows in you.”

In connected blogs from the CEF staff, Gašper Pleško Zalar and Matija Čarman wrote about the importance of understanding how people learn and how we apply this to our practice, while comprehending the value of having a good sense who to target to achieve the best impact. Both posts highlight the importance of helping beneficiary institutions to enable their talents in the scope of learning and developing institutional capacities. In her post, Jana Repanšek highlighted that in order to enable learning we first need to trust ourselves and each other. We too often “address things too technically, thinking that our intellect and logic will do the job. … We focus solely on using our brains, but we forget that we also have our hearts and emotions.” The post of Bojana Crnadak takes this topic a step further in the light of readiness for change: are we ready for a change. Or is it only that we want the change but not to change ourselves?

Once ready to change, we can deploy a host of learning solutions to support it, for instance webinars. At the beginning of the year (just two days before the first full moon in 2017 – January 12), I asked an important question: Webinar’s content is KING. But is it really?, which still echoes in my mind with even more answers and lessons learned that will be shared in one of the upcoming blog posts later this year. It was a start which gave us enthusiasm to enhance the knowledge and skills of public officials from South East Europe also through other CEF learning initiatives.

Gentian Opre, Director of Budget Analysis and Programming Department at the Ministry of Finance of Albania, proved that a webinar can enrich others and introduce new knowledge. In one of our webinars, he presented the Albanian experience with differentiating budget implications of new and baseline (i.e. existing) policy initiatives. Our new staff member, Dijana Mitrović, also experienced the magic of the first webinar in five steps. She described how she as a facilitator survived that important learning initiative “in online business and learning in the context of public financial management, tax administration and beyond.”

In addition, we had the privilege to learn from our colleague Kaja Jurtela who taught us how to create your own facilitation style. Besides, we received full support from Luka Zupančič, who works in the CEF’s digital communication team and knows well that social media enables two-way communication in a learning community.  He wrote also a blog post We presented 12 members of our constituency at the CEF.

Half-way to the last full moon in 2017 (which will happen on December 3, 2017) has enriched the CEF Knowledge Hub with diverse and inspiring stories. Going through them should give you the answers to three (out of the four) questions at the beginning of this post. Do you also know the forth one? Who of our guest bloggers studied mathematical systems and modeling? I invite you to open our Knowledge Hub website, scroll the page, and find out whose blog post was not mentioned yet in this blog post. Let me help you with a quote by Johnny Cash that he used:

My mother used to tell me I should take it slow

The pace is not what matters, it’s the direction that you go

Keep your feet upon the path and your eyes upon the goal

You’ll have all the joy a heart could ever hold

Labor overcomes all.

We will meet again in September with new stories and learning insights. Wishing you inspiring holidays.

PS. And the answer is? Write it in a comment below.