Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Christy Pettit. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Christy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, let’s start with trends – what are some of the largest or more impactful trends you are seeing in the industry?

I work in mentoring and knowledge collaboration. It’s a fascinating time to be working with organizations of all sizes – transformation is very much on the menu and it’s not just new software systems.

Speaking in general terms, the pandemic shattered the already fragile “social contract” at work. Getting hybrid models working is taxing most organizations I know, even if they had a virtual component before. Many people called it “the big reset” – where people have started to think deeply about where they spend their time. I was sitting in on a leadership meeting to plan a mentoring kick off at an upcoming conference the other day, and a director of IT spoke up and said, “we can’t expect people who are at the conference to keep up on their emails while they are attending session. My people are already saying they won’t do it.”

We’ve always known time is precious, and after the global health crisis we’ve all been through, many people are taking a stand about their boundaries. Minding boundaries is part of the new “employee experience”. So is finding the meaning in the work – always important but now crucial, particularly to the coming generations. With the constant influx of information on the seemingly intractable problems of the human race, our young people want what they do to matter.

Christy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I co-founded Pollinate Networks – software and services that support mentorships and knowledge collaboration – because I am committed to being a solution finder for the seemingly intractable issues we have before us as a species. In 2007 I read Thomas Homer Dixon’s book The Ingenuity Gap and it really got me thinking about how the problems of our time (and that we as humans seem to keep adding to) can possibly be solved.

Before 2007, I’d been an executive in a training and development organization and I’d become really interested in measuring the results people were getting from their learning efforts. I saw over and over again how small groups and 1 to 1 learning and knowledge exchange showed up as the most impactful learning people were doing. I was smitten. A year later, I joined forces with my co-founder to determine how we could support collaboration and move knowledge and inspiration to where it was most needed.

We know that when mentoring works it REALLY works, so we’ve committed ourselves to the science and art of helping people find their ideal match. #thematchmatters

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

There are a small number of books that have kept me on track through my journey. Early days a mentor suggested to me Man in Search of Meaning by Victor Frankl. If one ever needed perspective this is a great book to get it from. Another couple of oldies that really impacted the way I thought about the problem I was trying to solve ( bringing people together to get important things done) were Janine Beynus’ Biomimicry – a book that talk about how nature inspires design, and Mark Buchanan’s book Nexxus that taught me about the science of small networks.

More recently, I’ve been inspired by Forget the Funnel – a book that is helping me make sense of marketing and sales in the “modern world” by Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Startups and small businesses are joyous and challenging. Pollinate has been no exception. Our founder group has been in business together since 2008 and we’ve had some amazing, exhilarating years and we’ve had some really tough years. We’ve had one of our team members die of cancer. We had a central team member lose a son. We’ve had clients go for months without paying.  We’ve had to learn from times when the fit with the project and Pollinate wasn’t right. Over the years we’ve had key people leave that forced us to learn things all over again.

For all of the tough things that keep on coming, our mission to get people together to get important things done draws us forward. We have a fabulous team of people to work with and an ecosystem around us who partner with us, help us and work at succeeding together. Scaling is the ultimate exercise in resiliency. You are always learning what you can and cannot control and finding out what is effective in managing those variables. For what you can control it’s often cycles of try-fail-try-succeed as you find a path by the constellation of signals coming in that you hope you are reading correctly.

My own experience is that purpose is central. Community, generosity and learning are all as central as good decision-making.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pollinate.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pollinatenetworks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pollinatenetworks
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/964527/admin/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PollinateNet

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