Get value from your membership

Make the network work for you and your team - every day!

You don’t have to wait for the next scheduled event in the learning calendar; there are numerous ways you can make use of your membership and tap into the insights and experience of your fellow members. We’ve listed some of the obvious and most popular ways here - hopefully they will inspire you to come up with other ways on your own.

2 different views

You can scroll through the ideas below or click through to our “project timeline view”; we have created a list that chronologically mirrors a typical project plan with ideas for how you can draw on the insights of others as you work through your own project:

Your ideas

Membership use cases

Where do you seek inspiration to ensure the product, service or experience you work on is living up to customer expectations and industry standards - while actually delivering on its promises?

You can partake in conferences and webinars where vendors and their favourite and carefully selected clients show the magnificent results of their partnerships.

Or you can look to real life cases of peers in your network, who are not under pressure to sell you a solution.

An added important benefit: in this forum, you won’t only see the finished result; you can get the background story straight from the horse’s mouth; you can question the creative minds behind the solution and get the insights and learnings from the process.

Learn about the things that worked, but more importantly the things that didn’t: the costly detours and delays, the rabbit holes to avoid, the stakeholders most likely to upset the apple cart, the unrealisable pipe dreams and the vanity features that cost a lot, but delivered nothing. These contextual realities naturally never translate exactly, but there is still significant value in the warning signals, principles and alternative ideas these behind-the-scenes insights reveal.

With the context you work in changing by the day, the needs of your organisation change with it.

You can be agile and adaptable - but who do you turn to for advice on how to adapt to today’s reality? Some days that reality appears to be different from yesterday’s and quite possibly from any you have experienced before.

You could call a consultant or consult a manual, but both require money and time. And in a truly new reality, their advice and your judgment would both rely on a fair bit of guess work.

Alternatively, you can call on your network of trusted peers; quickly compare relevant notes, hear each other’s considerations, early experiences and concerns and make the difficult decisions on a better and more informed basis.

Get deep and detailed feedback from highly qualified professionals; people who know and understand what you are talking about.

In most situations, your experience will guide you to make the right decision. Sometimes, intuition and gut instinct will play a part. In some cases, the best decisions are made jointly with colleagues or your boss. But who do you consult when your colleagues or boss look to you for direction; when you are expected to be the expert? Especially if the direction they are looking for is taking you into uncharted territory:

“What should our future operating model look like?”

or

”What would your proposal for a new strategy for your area look like? You can start with a blank-canvas”

Your experience will be important, but when the stakes are high and the field wide open, having your draft reviewed by experienced peers can be invaluable: they can spot flaws and point out potenial pitfalls, but also suggest improvements, new perspectives or entirely different alternatives.

And as the peers know you and your track record well, have no stake in your project and really want you to succeed, your pitch, confidence and the likelihood of a successful outcome can only grow stronger!

ConnectMinds is a network built on curiosity, openness and trust.

We do discuss the challenges and opportunities of now, but we also devote time to discuss bold new ideas and how we shape our roles and future careers. We assess the value and validity of emerging new trends and ideas; what should we invest time in exploring and what can we dismiss as buzz, hype and hot air?

ConnectMinds members work at a wide variety of organisations

- so you will have access to cases, examples and work practices at both public sector organisations, private enterprise with representation from most industries, government, NGOs, charitable organisations and foundations, media organisations, think tanks and higher education.

And critically: you will get to meet, know and learn from peers who work there. They can share the behind-the scenes accounts and provide the dos-&-don’ts that will help you steer clear of any avoidable pitfalls and costly delays.

You join a curated knowledge network with members from across all sectors and industries around the world; people working in your own field as well as a number of fields whose talents and competences you rely on every day.

Their insights and advice can cut out concerns, prevent costly detours and delays and reduce risk while adding inspiration, “fresh-eye-analysis” and an outside perspective to your project. This can speed up things and increase both the likelihood of a successful, on-time delivery and the likelihood of delivering the value and performance predicted / promised.

Use the network when you need to reignite your career.

The network is not only a great forum for filling any skills gaps, sharpening your knowledge and improving the success rate of projects in your current job; it can also be used a sounding board and a safe zone during times of uncertainty; members help each other speed up the journey from idea to delivered project, but also to accelerate the journey from finding oneself without a job to commencing the next one.

The network is still there when the many professional frameworks, tools, forums and services that come with a job suddenly become inaccessible if you lose it.

It is difficult to keep up with an increasingly crowded and confusing market place of products, services and methods and with it new success factors, terminology and required skills.

There are only so many newsletters, white papers and webinars one can get through in an already packed workday (and evening…)

By pooling our combined thinking, experience and considerations, we can share our respective “digests” and conclusions.

You can ask early movers and bleeding edge pioneers who have taken the first steps about their valuable initial experiences. And you can test your understanding of concepts, new approaches, frameworks and skillsets with industry experts and peers who understand your reality at our regular meetings. Stay on top of what you need to know and avoid wasting time on hype, buzz and hot air.

The membership offers a variety of formats tailored for meaningful networking and high impact learning.

You can tap into the knowledge of the network and interact with fellow members in a number of different ways; on- and offline; meeting 1:1, in small groups or participate some of the larger gatherings. The most effective formats are explained here on the site and we are always happy to answer any queries you might have. All formats are included in your ConnectMinds membership.

Quick and targeted access to snapshots, surveys, benchmarks and up-to-date industry data

If you need to weigh up new options, but have little to base your decision on, we can easily and quickly survey a relevant sample of our members. You won’t get thousands of respondents, but 50 ore 75 responses will still give you a good steer. If you are looking for answers to tactical questions about performance or for up-to-date input on what “best-in-class” looks like, a mini-benchmarking exercise might be the best answer. Again, quick and easy for us to set in motion and as long as we keep the scope and expectations within reason, our members are generally happy to participate. These tools may not replace the need to commission larger pieces of work with external service providers, but they will leave you with a basis for comparison and with the answers / input, you will be better equipped to choose the appropriate format for you and to brief any chosen external partner.

Get the really useful references - including those the vendor may not have chosen to give you.

We work in a field where the number of tools, solutions and services promising to make our customers happier, our colleagues more productive and our own lives easier grows by the day. Some of them are solutions looking for a problem; others extremely useful. So how do you evaluate, shortlist and assess? And once you get to the final shortlist, who do you talk to, not about features and functionalities, but about how the solution works in the real world?

The vendor will typically provide a list of [happy] customers; in itself not a surprise.

With a membership, you can call on the network, both to test the claimed usefulness of the solution and for a more balanced selection of references. We naturally cannot guarantee that there are customers of every obscure solution under the sun, but it is rare that we are unable to find relevant references and testimonials - so give it a try!