The value of working out loud is closing the gap between our expertise and others. Working out loud makes sharing easier by making it grounded in reality and by making it more common.
Yesterday I had a phone call from a former colleague looking for an expert to help with a specific work challenge. After a discussion about the challenge and who might help, we agreed my colleague actually had the skills to do the work and would learn more by trying. That’s the benefit of one small moment of surfacing and sharing a work problem. Some times we discover we have the answer. We just can’t see it.
When we work silently we lose touch with the relevance of our work to others. We lose touch with the external benchmarks of how our skills are growing. Working in silence, we have only our thoughts for company. They are rarely useful companions. We don’t know what we don’t know. We aren’t always kind to ourselves.
Accumulation of silence also becomes a big barrier to starting to talk. We think some point needs to be spectacular to justify breaking the quiet. I know many fabulous experts who can talk passionately about their work one-to-one. Too many of them would never stand on a stage or otherwise step up to discuss their work because they think it is not special enough.
When you work out loud you increase the feedback on what you know and get clues as to what you don’t know. When you work out loud you prevent the rising expectations that come from silence. Small continuous acts of sharing connect, build trust and create shared experience of work. That makes all future sharing easier.
Reduce the silence a little. Share some work out loud.
