Building INFLUENCE SHOW
Watch Episode #02
Mohsin says:
About this episode
This is Episode 02 from Season 01 Education. Season 01 contains eight episodes featuring guests who work in education. Each episode features a single guest, looking at their personal lives and careers, considering their perspective as a leader and creator. These interviews are candid and unfiltered.
About Mohsin Memon
Mohsin helps learning facilitators to use games in order to facilitate virtual and classroom instructor-led training. He used to work as a learning designer and facilitator in the past, facilitating learning experiences for Marsh, Netflix, Flipkart, Uber, Siemens, Bayer, JP Morgan, Capgemini and many others. Mohsin knows, first-hand, how games and technology can change the way learning happens by creating authentic and life-like learning experiences which ultimately lead to realisation and change. He dreams of a world where people play to learn. Mohsin has developed Evivve, a certification program that will equip facilitators with the ability to run MOGL (Multiplayer Game-based Learning) experiences. He is based in Mumbai, India.
Show notes
- I came to realise that the marriage between games and learning was one that could yield incredible results (03:30)
- I am a huge advocate for game-based learning for enabling change and behavioural shifts (04:20)
- Some of the things that really worked for me started with me identifying my singular message … understanding what it is that I really want to communicate (07:20)
- I track everything. I’ve shared my LinkedIn analysis previously on LinkedIn for others who may want to use it. I analyse it on a weekly basis. I track my posts, my reach, my likes and that tracking has helped me finetune and figure out who are the people that I really need to work with, the kind of message that’s working for my audience and tweaks I need to make along the way (08:15)
- What has been key to building my profile? Consistency. Letting the audience recognise you as an authority in your space and even before you attempt to be recognised as an authority, you first have to understand what that space is. For me, it was very clear. I am right at the intersection of games, learning and human behaviour (10:00)
- I couldn’t do other platforms. I tried Twitter and I reached about 10,000 or 12,000 followers and I didn’t quite get there. It didn’t really resonate and that led me to LinkedIn (12:15)
- I prefer not to just copy and paste something I find. 90% of the time I will create my own artwork, my own graphics or create my own animation … these don’t just come from anywhere, they are not stolen. They come from my experiences (13:25)
- I share a lot of resources with my community. People are going to value me and my work if I add value to them. So I have to figure out what it is that I can give to people and there are two minds you can operate from: an abundance mentality or you can operate from a scarcity mentality (15:00)
- Recently, I decided to give away my certification program on using games for learning to anybody in India who has the ability to hop on board at no cost (15:40)
- One way I put myself out there is through authoritative content, that is, the creation of high value content and then, through interaction and connecting with people (16:30)
- Learning credibility tension by HBR. One of the things consultants must constantly do is to craft relevance, craft resonance and craft substance (Harvard Business Review) (17:50)
- A good place to start when networking is to connect with the right people. Typically, one of the things you should do before you start connecting with people is to identify your niche (21:25)
- Try to keep your answers short, crisp and concise on social media (23:47)
- Past, present and future. Identify the work you have done over the last 5 – 10 years and identify what makes it unique and brings value. With the present, where are you now? And that should hopefully, give you an idea of where you are going in the next two or more years. Where do you want to be in two years? What do you want to be recognised for? (26:10)
- That’s why you need to be so aware of who is in your network (30:10)
- That led to my first game which I built using Whatsapp and Microsoft Excel macros. There were about 60 people playing the game (37:40)
- Learning is constant and everybody starts somewhere (39:45)
- I work a four day work week and I allocate a whole day for learning (39:58)
- I do a whole lot of experimentation which I embrace in all parts of my life (40:10)
- One of the stumbling blocks for me for a long time has been vulnerability (45:10)
- It was that conversation that changed everything. So that got me thinking about how deeply passionate I was about what I was doing in games and learning. So, in essence, I would say, find out what that is for you (50:10).
resources mentioned
- Harvard Business Review article of July 2018, How Consultants Project Expertise and Learn at the Same Time by Alaric Bourgoin and Jean-Francois Harvey
- Pokemon Go
- Assassin’s Creed
- Mohsin’s Evivve certification programme