By Abraham González-Báez Jalife [resourceful colleague and good friend]
Comments by Diego Lainez (DL)
I am truly glad to present my first guest writer: Abraham González-Báez Jalife (thank you so much Abe. It is great to have you here).
I met Abe at college, then life did the rest putting us in the same office twice. So, I can tell you that Abe is not only a dear colleague of mine but also a good friend and an excellent person. We share the passion for learning, we both are L&D professionals, and we often have agreements and disagreements (honest feedback). Resourcefulness is actually one of the ideas we share and agree on. I am happy he decided to write about it because Abe is one of the most resourceful guys I have ever met.
Having said that, this is Abe. Enjoy the ride!
Resourcefulness or the ability to find the way is embedded in all of us, and I am sure we all can think of a time where we have found a quick and clever way to overcome a challenge at work or at our daily life.
What thrills me the more about resourcefulness is that the digital era in which we live presents a very nice ground to exercise it; I will tell you in this article three stories that exemplify it.
1. (Not) boring as usual
A friend of mine just told me how he woke up last Saturday morning very keen about bringing to bed a super breakfast to his wife (he promised it earlier that week). He opened the fridge door and panicked a little bit because they had nothing out of the ordinary to cook.
While staring blankly at the white light of the fridge an image came to his mind. He immediately went for his phone and looked for a recipe online. Next thing he knew, he was making a couple of Croque Madame (when I told him I was writing about his experience, he confessed: minus the béchamel sauce).
That morning in a couple of minutes he went beyond what he had in the fridge and avoided making a boring as usual breakfast (DL: some people say that constraints are the most effective creativity boosters).
2. We can ask nicely
Last year I was involved in the design and execution of an event which involved more than 350 trainers. We were a solid team and achieved a great overall experience for them.
After the excitement passed I was stunned when one of the interns who was part of the team showed me this great-looking and seamless reaction survey she built for after the event.When I asked her: How did you pull that? She answered very naturally: I just built it with this free tool I’ve been using for a while.
(Diego Lainez: Great! Since we have smartphones and open-source, limitations have become relative. Data is the most critical resource).
A few weeks ago when working with a new team in a different company I heard someone saying something like: we can send each of them the survey via e-mail and compile their answers. Instead of going through that tortuous way I volunteered to build an online survey and used the very same tool my intern showed me before.
The result: it looked great, was easy to use, the answers came fast and the reactions were very positive. Resourcefulness did it again! (DL: Reading Abe’s I would say that resourcefulness is intimately linked to the daring and failing mindset, it’s all about trying something new!)
3. How hard could it be?
Having a coffee with a friend of mine he was telling me how he was thinking about bringing to life a new business about customized songs, he told me how he struggled with getting a few samples from the parent company he needed in order to start promoting it on a word of mouth kind of way.
Then he told me: “yesterday I had enough of waiting, and I thought: I have the songs, how hard could it be to cut them and put them together?” He went online, researched a little bit, downloaded a free software to do it, spend a couple of hours understanding how it worked and ta-da! he had his sampler; actually, he played it for me and I couldn’t tell this was not the edition of a “sound professional”.
(DL: Abe is actually talking about me here. Sound professional is too much of a compliment…he likes me! I only adventured myself to find out how to use Audacitybecause I saw Abe doing the same with Typeform and Wordclouds.com. Thank you, man!)
Resourcefulness is there, just take it
Most of our waking time we are involved in digital realms; doing a wide array of activities (communication, work, entertainment, networking, etc.) and these routines can easily blind us from what is possible and what is not in the digital world. Therefore, I encourage you to always have an open mind and say to yourself, to your peers, colleagues, friends, loved-ones I bet I/you/we could do that.
We live in a digital age, which means that we are extremely privileged because
even when we take it for granted, we have access to a variety of (re)sources. Most of them for free!
So, let’s keep in mind that time and patience are key factors to effective resourcefulness but practicing this kind of mindset can help you accomplish edgier, better and faster results in your professional and personal lives.
For more information about resourcefulness, go to the end of this post.
DL Final Comments
Limitations force us to be resourceful. In the middle of a digital age, resourcefulness becomes even more advantageous and the possibilities for the learning field are exciting.
Thank you for the note Abe! Great article about a topic we both try to practice as much as possible.
As Abraham just said, be more resourceful, try it, and tell us how you did it. Share this note or send it to a person you think can find it helpful. There is always someone.
More about Abe
Abraham González-Báez Jalife is a Learning Strategist. He has collaborated with and influenced cross-functional teams in several leading world-class companies. Abraham is currently learning a lot from his beloved newborn baby-girl and enjoys mountain biking.
Diego is an experienced learning advisor, a certified trainer and a design thinking consultant.
He is available for advisory where the focus is on driving transcendental learning and lasting change. Moreover, he is always eager to chat.
