The Launch of UnMentoring

Carl Haggerty recently posted about the recent Steering Group meeting in Huddersfield and introduced “UnMentoring” – well this post provides some more details and a link to signing up.

So what is UnMentoring?

So in the true spirit of adapting something that exists already we have essentially reworked Nesta’s Randomised Coffee Trials. It will start during March 2015.

UnMentoring (Randomised Coffee Trials in disguise) will work as follows:

Step 1: You sign up to committing to having a conversation remotely with a random person over a cup of your favourite refreshment (non alcoholic of course) for around 30 minutes to 1 hour once a month via the phone or through skype/Google Hangout. Sign up below using the google form

Step 2: You are randomly assigned somebody to have conversation with from among those who make the commitment – it will then be down to the both of you to self-organise and agree a mutually convenient time in a specified week. Remember that you are committing to speak to someone new every month, although there may be occasions when you get the same person twice, given the random nature of things.

Step 3: You are not obliged to talk about anything in particular, we would suggest you consider “Think, Do, Share” as themes to get you started but there is no rule. That’s it.

So why do this?

According to NESTA the benefits include the following:

• Provides legitimacy to chat to people about things that aren’t directly work related. Although every time there have been direct beneficial impacts on various projects and programmes.
• Totally random conversations, as well as some very useful work related conversations. Breaks silos… in a really effective way.
• Offers the chance to make time to talk to people they should be talking to anyway, and to meet people who they won’t be directly working with but it’s nice to know who they are!
• It’s a really good way of revealing links within and outside of the organisation and encouraging us to collaborate.
• They like the prompt to talk to someone new (or someone they already know), and the permission to take 30-60 minutes to just to see what’s going on, without any particular agenda or goal.

You can sign up for unmentoring here.