Wayfinders is introducing a new service. We will offer a facilitated opportunity to bring Members together for mutual aid. In our initial session we will discuss our best methods for facilitating mutual aid. We will introduce methods from MasterMind and other programs.
The name of this service is not yet determined and is expected to emerge from the first couple of sessions.
Robert Laurence (Bob) Ascah was born in Lachine, Quebec and received degrees in Commerce and Public Administration (M.A) from Carleton University. He completed his doctorate in political science at the University of Alberta in 1984.
Before his appointment as Director of the Institute for Public Economics, he worked for the Alberta public service. After a short stint in Federal and Intergovernmental Affairs, he joined Alberta Treasury where he was responsible for financial sector policy, foreign borrowing, and liaison with ratings agencies. In 1996, he joined Alberta Treasury Branches (ATB Financial) as Secretary to the Board. Subsequently, Dr. Ascah was responsible for business planning, economics and government relations. In that capacity, Ascah was a frequent speaker on economics and financial institutions policy. He retired from ATB Financial in May 2009.
Bob Ascah is Chair, Canadian Cancer Society, Alberta/NWT Division and is the academic liaison for the Edmonton Regional Group of the Institute for Public Administration of Canada. In 1999, the University of Alberta Press published Ascah’s Ph.D. dissertation Politics and Public Debt- The Dominion, the Banks and Alberta’s Social Credit.
Since joining the Parkland Institute, he has become a frequent media commentator on financial and economic issues. He is currently Program Chair with the Economics Society of Northern Alberta and Principal of his company Abpolecon.ca
You can find Bob’s blogsite at Abpolecon.ca
Associate Broker / Realtor at RIGHT Real Estate
Gordon Edmistion, BA, ABR, RENE, SRS, is a licensed Realtor in the province of Alberta working in residential, commercial and rural property sales and leasing in the Greater Edmonton Area. Having worked with clients and developers for 19+ years in full time sales of new and used properties.
RIGHT Real Estate is an Edmonton based real estate brokerage specializing in residential real estate. Previously as CondoCrew we established ourselves as Edmonton’s premier condo specialized real estate brokerage that was established in 2004 to satisfy the escalating need for condo specialization in the real estate industry. However, as the real estate market and clientele is ever changing, we wanted to diversify to better serve ALL of your real estate needs. All of our REALTORS® are full time professionals trading in new and used real estate.
Our mission is to always be striving for excellence, providing an outstanding level of service and ultimately becoming the first choice for all of your real estate sales and purchases in the Greater Edmonton Area.
Contact Gordon at:
Website: http://rightrealestate.ca/
Email: gordonedmiston@alain
Clare is a seasoned professional Coach and Trainer with extensive experience in a wide variety of industries, including Oil & Gas, Construction, Retail, and others. Specializes in helping SME’s grow and prosper through better use of ‘People Analytics’ for hiring and training.
Specialties: Job Benchmarking, Job Candidate Assessments, On-boarding, Performance Development, Behavioural and EQ Coaching, Mentoring
Provides professional support for hiring, on-boarding, performance development, and succession solutions, resulting in decreased turnover, increased productivity, and vastly improved employee engagement through use of job benchmarking, skill assessments, behavioral and motivational matching.
Digital Storyteller and Promotional Campaigns (events and digital)
Everyone has a story to tell but, if the cover doesn’t catch people’s attention, nobody will read the book.
My educational background is in the fields of Human Resources and Psychology. With this, I have the benefit of understanding both the corporate mindset as well as how clients and customers think and what they respond to.
As a marketing and advertising professional for the past ten years, I have worked with Authors, Speakers, Entertainers, Recording Artists, Celebrity brand Red 55 Winery – The Signature Wine of Miranda Lambert, and many Not For Profit and charitable organizations.
Many of the events and other endeavours I have been involved with have been featured in the news. There is no project or event that is too small for a press release. I have been fortunate to be featured in articles across Canada, being interviewed by media outlets in Alberta and British Columbia, and being featured in special segments on morning television news shows.
“Storytelling through visual mediums is my passion!” – Shannon Berry
On a personal note, I enjoy the outdoors, writing, painting, reading, running, and traveling.
To contact Shannon:
shannon@madwomenva.com
Wayfinders Business Co-operative held its Annual General Meeting for the year ending March 31, 2022 on Thursday, September 22, 2022. It was held jointly in-person at Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues and on Zoom.
Two new directors were elected to the board, Paul Cheung and Dave Yadallee.
David was one of those geeky math nerd kids who had the good fortune of being a hard-worker who saved his money, and who, becoming a teenager in the early 1980s, could afford to buy a personal computer.
He started this company back in 1996, back when Apple was doomed, and a googol was just a very large number.
Since that time, David’s company has successfully pivoted from being an internet service provider, to a web hosting company, to web site developers, to a custom web application development company, where David, and his team of permanent, full-time employees, have always had a focus on customer service.
David’s experience in technology and business has helped him acquire a keen ability to deconstruct systems, see optimizations, and establish clear communications between his clients and his technical team.
Here’s a bit about David’s company:
Arrai Innovations is an Edmonton internet services company that was formed in 1996, and specializes in creating purpose-built web databases and information management systems for our wide variety of clients across North America.
You can reach David at:
https://www.arrai.com/
Lloyd graduated from the School of Agriculture, University of Saskatchewan in 1963. He was subsequently employed for 35 years by a major Western Canadian manufacturing, wholesaling and retailing organization. His various responsibilities through several different positions included sales, marketing, operations, facility development, recruitment, hiring and monitoring.
During his career, he attended numerous courses, seminars and workshops on a wide variety of topics. However, a seminar/workshop on “Performance Planning and Review” was by far the most valuable in improving management skills.
Following retirement in 1998, he assisted some small businesses relative to Job Descriptions and Performance Appraisals. Those projects, along with other business contacts, led him to conclude that few small to medium-sized businesses and organizations have implemented the kinds of programs he had been using to great advantage for more than 20 years. The primary client target was those with fewer than 100 employees. There is an obvious need for such a program, so he began developing a Performance Management Package adapted to the requirements of those businesses and organizations. His business, Callcraft Consulting, had a simple objective – help improve productivity and employee job satisfaction to contribute to overall efficiency and profitability.
The program now being used in his work with a wide range of employers is based on practical, proven methods to improve productivity by having businesses meet their objectives through employees meeting their individual objectives. This is achieved through Job Descriptions, Orientation Checklists, Workplans, Appraisals, Employee Career Plans and the associated forms, worksheets and guidelines.
Starting in 2004, Lloyd teamed with Darel Baker from Keldar Leadership to conduct a series of one-day seminars and workshops on Recruitment, Hiring and Performance Management to many business and organization owners and managers. Included in these sessions was an introduction to Lloyd’s “Hire for HIPPA, Train for Skill” concept, which illustrates the importance of emphasizing personal attributes in the hiring process. Please see the overview under Seminars and Workshops.
For moire information see About Lloyd Kenney – Performance Management
You can contact Lloyd at callcraft@shaw.ca
By Randal Adcock
It was a long hibernating winter!
Leaves and grass are turning green. Unemployment is apparently low. We may vacillate between hope and doubt. Is the economy recovering? Are our political leaders making the right choices? If bad things like a pandemic can happen, what else? Or, maybe the odds of life will now turn in our favour?
Meanwhile, Wayfinders is continuing to pursue the construction of a new cloud platform. Its been a very long time coming but we have made progress on a number of fronts and we’re building capacity. It will include a number of functions to support our Members in business.
We have not been doing Cafes for a while. A combination of pandemic fatigue and Zoom fatigue dropped participation. However, the opportunity exists to revitalize and resume.
Most people have been hoping for a “New Normal” that is better than the “Old Normal”, but normal nevertheless. Even prior to the pandemic, people were siting a lack of meaningfulness in their work. We do our best work when there is sufficient balance of certainty and challenge in our environments. With familiarity we can work more automatically and spontaneously. We can be agile and adaptable. This is something we can all create for ourselves.
Sometimes we feel overwhelmed, defeated and powerless. We need to test that theory. Is life really that intimidating? In rehab psychology they talk about “baby steps“. In the business world of design thinking we start small with a MVP (minimal viable product). People, like all living things, are essentially decision makers. Every decision you will ever make is a ROI (return on investment) decision. That is, we want more value coming out of our activities than we put in. In other words, we are value-generating decision makers.
We don’t want to make a big investment up front when there are many unknowns. Its too easy to make mistakes and the payoffs are tentative at best. The value we create is for ourselves and others. In order to make an investment wisely, we set out on a learning path. That path takes the shave of an S- curve, commonly called a ‘learning curve‘.
At the beginning of the learning curve, you know very little about the subject, maybe a new product or service to explore. So it comes to your attention, you become Aware of this subject and develop a Desire to learn more. You are curious, so you pursue further Knowledge, which leads to some testing of applied skill or Ability. When you repeat that ability with practice in different situations, you Reinforce the learning and it gets stronger. “Practise makes perfect“. The learning path spells ‘ADKAR‘. Remember it! Thank you Wendy Lickacz for teaching me about ADKAR!
You can’t generate value all by yourself. As a social animal, the process used will always be more or less collaborative, and the value you create is meant to be shared. We have always had a sharing and collaborative economy. But, two questions – 1) for collaboration, what talents and resources are you missing that can be found in other people? and 2) for outcomes, what do other people value? Answers – 1) know your strengths and challenges, and 2) Ask them!
To improve collaboration industrial psychologists have developed a lot of tools for measuring talents, traits, skills, interests and dispositions so they can be matched to job descriptions. We now live in an age in which we can use artificial intelligence to match people with others based on complementary talents and traits and shared values. Wayfinders is exploring ways to incorporate this into our platform. This will leverage your talents and passions to improve your value-generation potential.
“Ask your customers what they want” – Its easy for me to repeat these words. For many if us, reaching out to ask questions is a lot harder in practice. Only a portion of the population is natural at this and we don’t get much education or training for it in our K-12 system. For another thing, people are suffering from choice fatigue. For yet another factor, if you are an innovator, chances are, people will not be familiar with what you are offering, so it will take some extra convincing to even get their attention.
Put our best ideas together and you get a customer-oriented MVP learning curve for collaborative value-generation. Oh! Mouthful! In other words, get on a learning curve to get better at collaboration and talking to your customers — so you learn how to be a better value generator. How do you feel along this learning path? A bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. When your excitement about new-found knowledge is not matched by competence, it can be an emotional roller-coaster. Stick with it to see the full rewards.
But wait… there is more. As a value-generator you know that ‘knowledge is power’. Power for what? Knowledge reduces uncertainty and overcomes the risks associated with uncertainty. If you are able to build a business model that is a good match among your natural talents and those of your partners, and then match that model to produce the things other people value, then you will create a level of management competence and certainty around you.
Recent studies in the psychology of happiness have found that we need two things to make us happy – 1) to be loved, and 2) to be in a productive work flow (generating value). This makes so much sense for both collaboration and sharing. Life is a journey, not a destiny. We don’t stand still. We move, sometimes backward, but mostly forward with intent. Much of the time forward is up hill. But, step-by-step, we can learn to master the art and science, even the spirit, of the journey. It is easier when we support one another on this way-finding journey.
