Approach – Ardcairn

Our approach

Our unique, human-centric approach: Mesh.

Our unique approach helps us to gain a comprehensive overview and understanding of your organisation’s skills needs. It draws on our extensive work creating global skills standards and defining open practices that prepare individuals for navigating emerging Web3 technology, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. It is formed around the concepts of:

An open, regenerative culture and leadership practices that catalyse the components and connections in the organisation to get the most value out of every part.

A mesh structure formed of granular components that connect, and interact, and that capitalise on the value that can be derived from reusing, remixing and repurposing.

View our work page to see how we have used our approach to help companies, governments, and non-governmental organisations to release value.

Tenets

The tenets...

Express the values that inform our approach and practices to generate them. They are interdependent and inform each other.

Lenses

The lenses...

Provide a rounded perspective of the organisation with different vantage points for considering skills needs and aid a systems thinking approach.
Acronym: COG

Conditions

The conditions...

Articulate leadership and organisational behaviours that aid the implementation of upskilling at scale.
Acronym: ORBITALS

Connection

Connection prompts knowledge sharing across the organisation and beyond to external stakeholders and communities. It aids sustainable regeneration and evolution by bringing together many skills, perspectives and an ecosystem of support.

Visibility

Visibility promotes behaviours and processes that aid seeing the unseen, revealing trapped and untapped skills and gaining insights to the skills needs of the organisation.

Trust

Trust is required for individuals and teams to accept new skills requirements, develop themselves and to perform at their best. We use tried and tested techniques to gain your team’s trust and catalyze their professional development.

Core

Perspective:

Leadership team learning culture and behaviours
Individuals’ skills-awareness and learning behaviours

Operational

Perspective:

Organisational skills programmes, processes and frameworks
Organisational learning culture

Global

Perspective:

Wider context and skills requirements of the emerging era
Global skills initiatives, developments and standards

Open

Encompasses approaches, practices and cultural norms that promote the open characteristics of adaptability, transparency, inclusivity, collaboration, and community. Prompts a mindset and behaviours that are beneficial for implementing sustainable, wide-scale upskilling.

Regeneration

Prompts a willingness to transform through continuous cycles of change, and to generate and regenerate to remain relevant and be sustainable.

Balance

Prompts balancing of different perspectives and needs, such as balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the organisation and wider stakeholders to achieve sustainable change.

Information flow

Empowers knowledge building, informed decision-making, the exchange of data, ideas and information, contribution from distributed and potentially decentralised experts, and engagement with communities.

Trust practices

Are key to developing sustainable relationships and partnerships, empowering teams, defining ethical behaviours and enabling a culture of learning and regeneration.

Awareness

Vital for individuals and organisations to understand where they are now, where they want to go and what skills they need to get there.

Learning

A pre-requisite for upskilling, rapid adaptation and regeneration. Enabling the connecting and weaving of distributed knowledge with collaborative learning opportunities enables individuals to learn through the exchange of ideas and provides opportunities for connection, exploration and network formation to aid a sustainable learning culture.

Sustainability

Cultural norms, behaviours and mindsets that will result in sustainable upskilling to regenerate, remain relevant, be resilient and future-proof the organisation.

What people say about us

May 16, 2023 No Comments

"Grainne [and team] built a great rapport with the stakeholders and quickly understood the problem, the business and the wider context in which we operate. They helped us enormously to make sense of where we were and what we still needed to do in order to make progress with our project."

"So easy to do business with, innovative in everything they do and a delight to work with."

"[They] engage with people they have never met before and they have great interpersonal skills. They can work with a difficult or guarded audience to tease things out of them and get a good outcome. This is real art - how they engage people and get concepts across."

"Thank you for your contribution and excellent work on our workshops!"

"These are the technologists, thinkers and builders, past and present, who help us keep the Internet alive and accessible — a global community dedicated to preserving the power and potential of the world's largest public resource."

(Ardcairn founder, Grainne Hamilton, listed on the Mozilla Monument)

"The team’s skills and expertise in digital technologies for learning, productivity, change and teamwork together with their ability to coach and challenge, has really helped us develop as an educational organisation. I would wholeheartedly recommend them."

"City of Learning UK is a project which utilises these digital badges as well as the many resources within cities such as museums, libraries, workplaces and colleges."

(Cities of Learning UK cited in UK Government strategic review of good work)

"I know learning outside the classroom can give me the skills I need for the future, but I don’t know what’s out there in the city. If [Cities of Learning] can help with that, that will help a lot of young people like me."

Using our approach

We provide strategic and operational advice on how to:

Empower performance

We address topics such as:

Personal agency

Psychological safety

Lifelong learning

High-performing teams

Human-centricity

Collaboration

See the unseen

We address topics such as:

Skills awareness

Skills articulation

Personalised skills pathways

Reaching harder-to-reach groups

Skills networks

Advocates and ambassadors

Optimise deployment

We address topics such as:

Cross-functional individuals

Recruitment and skills discovery

Retention

Skills conduits

Decentralised contribution

Sustaining and regenerating

Read about our approach in the book, Mesh

Available from online book retailers in North America, UK, Europe & Australia

“Within the digital revolution, every organisation has become a technology organisation. It is almost impossible for an organisation to avoid the use of digital technologies in some form or another, with digital technologies having a significant impact on how organisations work, learn and connect.

To date, traditional work models have focused on centralisation, vertically drawn hierarchies, and on-premise and geographic proximity-based workers. These attributes are not well-suited for the increasingly remote and gig-based workforce of the 4th Industrial revolution that is unfolding in real-time.

To effectively pivot and embrace the potential and flexibility of decentralisation, organisations must change how they design their cultures and structures to prime for Web3. While the teams that manage and implement technology often adopt open cultural practices to aid rapid development and deployment, the open, transparent and decentralised nature of Web3 technologies, moves the need for open practices beyond the realm of technology teams to the whole organisation.”

Bryan D. Eldridge. (Foreward)

A must-read for an individual or organisation looking to innovate and evolve the way they work and collaborate in the dawn of Web3!

Bryan D. Eldridge