Author: simongterry

Working Out Loud: Chat, Conversation & Collaboration

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, future of work, Working out loud

 

Working Out Loud can generate a lot of confusion for people who are new to the term. Being clear on whether your goals are best advanced by a Chat, a Conversation, or a Collaboration will help the effectiveness of your working out loud.

The Many Interactions of Working Out Loud

Working Out Loud involves sharing work purposefully with communities that can help your work or can learn from it. The concept is deliberately a broad one. The concept covers a lot of different kinds of interactions.

There is no one right way to work out loud. John Stepper has written a fabulous book on one approach to working out loud to achieve personal and career goals. Jane Bozarth has an equally great book full of examples of people showing their work in many and varied ways and for many reasons. The WOLWeek website has a range of interviews with Working Out Loud practitioners and many practices are described. There are more approaches.

Working Out Loud is inherently adaptive. There is no one perfect way because nobody else has exactly your situation, your needs, and your network.  Learning how to navigate networks through generosity, transparency, and collaboration is a big part of the challenge and the source of the benefits of working out loud.

Chats, Conversations, and Collaborations as Working Out Loud

One way to reduce the confusion around working out loud and to improve the effectiveness of your practice is to be clear on what it is that you are looking for when you work out loud.  Are you looking for a Chat (shared information), a Conversation (shared understanding), or a Collaboration (shared work)? Each of these kinds of interactions involves a different level of engagement and add a different amount of value to your work. Each of these will require you to have a different relationship with and deliver different value to the other people involved in the interactions.

Understanding which interaction will best support your goals will help you choose the community and the approach. Many people get disappointed when they work out loud on twitter and they don’t get an immediate response that advances their work. Others get frustrated that people working out loud use twitter and appear to be engaging in self-promotion. In both cases, we are seeing a misalignment between the individual and the expectations of their networks.

More Effective Interactions

Reflecting on the desired interactions and the best communities to support them can help you improve your working out loud. After alll omproving the effectiveness of your Working Out Loud is an ongoing adaptive exercise:

Look for Shared Goals: If someone doesn’t share your goals then even a Chat is a distraction. Both Conversations and Collaborations require strong goal alignment. Look for individuals and communities who share your goals.

Invest in Relationships First: People are more likely to give if they see you as equally generous. People are more likely to care if they think you care. People are more likely to notice if you have noticed them. Use Chats, Conversations, and Collaborations to build relationships in your networks. Remember that in transparent networks people see not just your interactions with them but with others as well. You will have a reputation that is the sum of your interactions.

Choose Networks that Suit the Interaction You Want: Communities each have a dominant mode of interaction. Is it chatty? Do people help each other or engage in long debates? Pick communities that are suited to the interaction that will best suit your work. If you are looking for a richer interaction, such as a collaboration to solve a difficult work challenge, then choose networks where the relationships will support that interaction or where people share common approaches to interaction.  No community is 100% one mode but aligning to the dominant approach first will help you be most effective and allow you to branch out later.

Be Clear on the Purpose of Your Working Out Loud: Ask for the help you need. Be clear on the kind of responses that will advance your work. Help others to best help you and also reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding or embarrassment.

Start Small and Experiment: The adaptive nature of Working Out Loud means that it will take some experimentation for you to develop your own approach, develop relationships and to find the networks and interactions that best foster your work. Start small and experiment to learn how best to leverage working out loud in your work.

Digital Communication: The Practice of Poetry

Posted on by simongterry in future of work, Learning

Digital communications can benefit from the lessons and practice of poetry.

In May 1991, Dana Gioia wrote an essay in the Atlantic Monthly called ‘Can Poetry Matter?’  The article was a major contribution to a long-running debate on the relevance of poetry in a modern world that appears to run on prose. Gioia’s conclusion to this long running debate on the cultural significance of poetry and its practice was clear in his summary:

If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more*

In 1991, digital had only just begun its progress to its current pervasive state. Gioia does not even reference digital journals and blogs which now reinforce his point on the niche audience for much modern poetry. We have learned a great deal since then on the practices of digital business and digital communication. Two decades of lessons in digital communication is still a small fraction of the lessons learned across the centuries of history of poetry.

Why Learn from Poetry? Isn’t it Dead?

Modern digital communication can benefit from a deeper understanding of the practices and art of poetry. In many ways, poetry has been practising to refine approaches that align to current challenges facing digital communication.

Capturing The Essence: Gioia gives a strong clue to one rationale when he defines his first rationale for poetry in his essay:

Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.

Digital communication always faces a poverty of attention. Extracting the highest value from expression and conveying as much meaning as attention will allow is essential.

Expressing the Experience: The mobility of digital communication means that messages no longer sit apart from any experience. Digital communications must help express, support and enrich the experience. Poetry has long battled with this same challenge of capturing, enhancing and enriching the human experience.  There are lessons to be drawn in the relationship between poetry and the experiences that it captures and supports.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them – Charles Simic

The use of poetry in ritual in human history is a sign to its power in experiences.

Leveraging Reflection: The practice of writing poetry requires observation of the experiences of life and reflection. Wordsworth described poetry as:

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Similarly, Robert Frost wrote:

Poetry is when an emotion has found a thought and the thought has found words

Digital communicators can provide an important outlet from the busy pace of work. They can write from and help provoke a deeper reflection on the daily experience of work and life.

Engaging through Rythm & Rhyme: The first poets had no written poetry. Jorge Luis Borges once said

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Homer was a bard who told his tales from memory and they were passed on in memory. Many of our literary techniques are echoes of ideas that go back beyond the Ancient Greeks to master poetry and rhetoric. Sections of Shakespeare’s plays on the page can be a struggle for a modern reader but put them in the hands of an actor who can work the structure and they sing with new meaning. Read poetry and you realise the power of the rhythm of words and rhyme structures to engage others and to support your own efforts to share the work. When much digital communication struggles to hold attention, leveraging rhythm and rhyme for engagement remains relevant.

Memorable & Memetic: Great poems and great lines of poetry are memorable. This memorability is often based in universality of the ideas. Keats said

Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

The English language is filled with phrases from the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare or the poetry of the King James Bible. They are so common now we barely can trace their origins. The potential of digital communication is to find that central, shared, memorable idea, phrase or aphorism that can live beyond one reading and spread through your networks as its own meme.

Open to Experimentation: Since the beginning of human history, poetry has experimented with forms, rhythms, rhymes, assonance, visual and verbal representations of messages. The most successful forms like the sonnet, the haiku, rap or the spoken word jam were tested and refined before spreading around the languages of the world. Digital communicators have learned to measure their effectiveness using the new tools available. A breadth of experimentation will help ensure that digital communication does not become trapped in local maximums of performance like the listicle.

Bringing in the Whole Human: Communication is not just a process of the human brain. Poetry shows the ways we can communicate beyond recitation of facts and logic. We have already seen digital communicators begin to leverage visual imagery in new ways to reinforce messages. Poetry also earns its attention by reaching for a deeper meaning in what is often a brief form:

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. – TS Eliot

Emotion, experience, spirituality, beauty and more are opportunities for experimentation for effective digital communicators as well. Finding richer ways to connect with human meaning is always an effective approach to communication.

Change: In the Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysse Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ His point was that poetry is a way in which communities share and develop norms. Digital communication must play the same role in networks reinforcing the values and creating shared connection as new communities come together. Poetry has exploited its marginal place to push boundaries as Thomas Hardy pointed out:

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Equally importantly, Salman Rushdie laid out the challenge for the poet as follows:

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep

No challenge is more relevant to digital communicators when the virality of a message now outweighs its accuracy or usefulness.

Adapting: Paul Valery once said ‘a poem is never finished only abandoned’. The same holds true of digital communications. The work should be adapted continuously based on feedback, performance and changing circumstances. The goal is enhanced effectiveness and continued relevance.  Communication that is static is dead and abandoned.

The lessons above are but a few of thousands of years of the practice of poetry to engage the human mind and soul. Any digital communicator can learn from that collective experience. If applying poetry in digital communications seems unlikely, you can at least consider what poetry can do to improve your prose:

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. Virginia Woolf

Always be a poet, even in prose – Charles Baudelaire

Notes:

* This insight has an echo in Steve Blank’s startup maxim ‘there are no facts inside the building so get the heck outside’

The Jigsaw 

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

You start with a jumbled pile of pieces and an image of the ideal outcome. 

People offer contradictory advice: sort them by colour or shape or build landmarks first. Some sounds like meaningless work and some sounds useful. You decide to start anyway with your keen eye as a guide. 

You build a few towers. You find some pieces are edges and start to mark out the boundaries of your current endeavours. Some times you get the boundaries wrong but don’t find out until later. 

At first there are lots of landmarks and things come together easily. Pieces go in a rush. You experience the satisfaction as steps to the goal resolve out of mess. You smile as a piece slips in just perfectly. 

Some times the detail of a piece is unclear and you stare at it, rotating it looking for a clue as to where it fits in your ideal. Trial and error works some times. Then there is the piece that seems like it fits but won’t go. Other pieces have to be put aside for later. Once or twice you walk away from the board to do something else for a new perspective. 

You find other people can see things that you have missed and add pieces to the puzzles. Some hang around to help as capitivated as you are by the challenge. 

The greenery you thought was a challenge succumbs to careful attention. There were clues hidden in there to guide your work. 

Things start to get serious. You clean loose pieces off the board and sort them carefully.  You find the pieces you think you’ve lost. Some you had all along. Others slipped out of sight and required a search. One isn’t from this puzzle. At least one was hidden deliberately. 

Slowly your goal rises from the mess. Your goal gets richer and more complete piece by piece. The smallest details are the hardest to finish. Your head hurts and you wonder why you started, but the end is in sight. 

You can see almost the whole landscape. It’s been hours of painstaking collaborative work. Now you just have to tackle that expanse of blue sky. 

What’s Your Knowledge Proficiency?

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

Many people are constrained by a binary view of knowledge. They focus on whether they know something or not. In a network era, it can be more useful to ask what level of knowledge will enable a working proficiency to learn more from professional networks. You don’t need to be a master in each area of knowledge but a functional proficiency will enable you to access the knowledge required from your networks.

We are familiar in learning languages with explicitly describing different levels of proficiency. The US State Department has a 6 level scale for proficiency of language ability. Understanding proficiency in language in this way helps them to separate functional levels of performance in a language in ways that are important to their work as diplomats.

  • Level 0 – No Practical Proficiency: No practical speaking proficiency. No practical reading proficiency.
  • Level 1 – Elementary Proficiency: Able to satisfy routine travel needs and minimum courtesy requirements. Able to read some personal and place names, street signs, office and shop designations, numbers and isolated words and phrases
  • Level 2 – Limited Working Proficiency Able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements. Able to read simple prose, in a form equivalent to typescript or printing, on subjects within a familiar context
  • Level 3 – Minimum Professional Proficiency Able to speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and professional topics. Able to read standard newspaper items addressed to the general reader, routine correspondence, reports, and technical materials in the individual’s special field.
  • Level 4 – Full Professional Proficiency Able to use the language fluently and accurately on all levels pertinent to professional needs. Able to read all styles and forms of the language pertinent to professional needs.
  • Level 5 – Native or Bilingual Proficiency Equivalent to that of an educated native speaker. Equivalent to that of an educated native.

We don’t see language proficiency as a binary. We learn language through using it in interactions with others. We understand it is a complex skill and an ongoing challenge of mastery of increasingly complex interpersonal interactions. We understand that there is not a stock of language to know. We recognize that there is an ongoing flow of learning to develop and that with enough skill to participate in the work we can accelerate our journey to mastery through interactions.

The digital network economy has made it more evident that knowledge can be accessed from others when we have sufficient proficiency. When we apply a similar logic to learning in new areas of knowledge in a network economy, we can see that we can draw parallels to a proficiency structure for knowledge:

  • Novice (Levels 0 & 1 above): Not enough knowledge to do more than make personal connections with knowledge experts. Struggle to sustain a conversation in a new knowledge area.
  • Working Proficiency (Levels 2 & 3): Enough knowledge to engage in increasingly complex discussions in the knowledge area and put some of the knowledge to use. A working proficiency of the jargon and structure of the main body of knowledge in the area. However, regularly experiences the limits of their understanding, can identify those who know more and can use this skill as a guide to learn more from masters in the field.
  • Mastery (Levels 4 & 5): Mastery is not an endpoint. It is a state of ongoing improvement in conjunction with peers.  An individual at this level has enough knowledge to lead the development of the discipline or knowledge area and to help others to enhance their knowledge. There is no mastery without practice.

The goal of learning in the modern workplace should be to use a broad range of learning solutions to first achieve a working proficiency. From that point an individual can participate in work and continue to access support to advance towards mastery. With a working proficiency, personal knowledge mastery and other forms of social learning are increasingly accessible to guide an individual’s practice to mastery. An individual with a working proficiency is better enabled to manage their own learning in networks.

It’s Not the Year: Attitude and Action

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

OMG! We’ve made it out of 2016. We snuck through with our lives, our livelihoods and our sanity intact (We might have a few doubts about all three that we won’t share publicly). 

Except,

2017 is just another year. 365 days organised sequentially and filled with external events from the random to the planned, from the heart warming to the shockingly tragic. It is not the year that does the work for good or bad. The days themselves are innocent. 

We do the work. Our attitudes and our actions shape every single day. We make a difference to our year one day at a time, one action at a time and one thought at a time. 

To make 2017 the year you want to remember, begin with the attitudes and the actions. Make each day count. 

Happy New Year! Now show us what you can do with this one. 

ICYMI: Top 10 Posts of 2016

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

Halfway through this year, I swapped from my Tumblr blog to this new WordPress powered site. My recap of the top 10 posts for the year will be 5 from each six months.

Here are the Top 5 Posts by views for the second half of 2016

Here are the Top 5 Posts by views for the first half of 2016 from simonterry.tumblr.com. Two of these are prior year favourites that I regularly reuse and recommend.  All these historical posts are now included in the archive on this site.

One older post missed the top 5 in each but had enough traffic to be in the top 10 across both sites.  The message still holds true: The Future of Work is the Future of Leadership.

My personal bonus: The most fun post to write this year was The Life Crushing Magic of Hierarchy.

Empathy

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

In my reflections on 2016, I included the insight that “there is always more context”. At the heart of this insight is a need for greater empathy. In 2017, I want to do more to foster empathy through my work. Greater empathy is transformational in an organisation’s culture and effectiveness.  It is also a big step to making work more human.

Empathy

After years of making work more mechanistic and more clinical, we are starting to see the return of the practice of empathy. Better service experiences, more effective leadership, and realising the potential of people all require greater empathy than traditional management practiceEmpathy is deeply embedded in the social nature of humanity.

Empathy is deeply embedded in the social nature of humanity.  Our brains have mirror neurons to help us to react to emotions expressed by others and experience them.  We need to use them more. Empathy is a key contributor to human social connection and a foundation for generosity. As organisations start to see the alignment of more human ways of working fostering to their strategic goals, efforts to return empathy to our organisations will continue to rise.

Practices of Empathy

Reflect: Until our minds are calm enough to reflect on and make sense of our own experience we will struggle to be empathetic to others. We need to put aside the time for reflection and for consideration of others.

Humility: The more wrapped up we are in ourselves and our importance the lesson able we are to be empathetic to others. A little humility helps our empathy. Working out loud can help expose the less perfect and more humbling side to others.

Be Purposeful: Purpose is the effect we have on others. Purpose pushes out into the world to understand others and the effects we have from their perspective. Challenging ourselves to be more purposeful will makes us more empathetic and more effective.

Listen: We don’t listen enough to others. We listen to confirm our perspectives. We are too quick to share our own.  We need to listen longer, more actively and more deeply to truly understand.

Design: Empathy is the first step of a design thinking approach. Until a designer or design team understands the user’s needs and challenges from their perspective then they cannot generate the insights or develop an effective solution. Prototyping and experimentation reinforce the lesson that it is the experience of others, not our egos that determine success.

Collaborate: As we connect, share, solve and innovate together we are drawn out of our shell. Our understanding of others, their contexts, and their concerns increases. Shared work reminds us of the value and the need for empathy.

Give: People in our organisations were never as mechanistic or as self-interested as management theory wished. We always have had human generosity in the wirearchy to make the hierarchy work. The practice of generosity develops understanding, trust, and community.

The Gift

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

When we say this time of year brings a gift of peace and joy, we should also include a reminder that some assembly is required and no batteries are included. It’s up to us to make the gift and keep it working.

2016 Year in Review

Posted on by simongterry in future of work

2016 was a middling year in the all time rankings so it has taught me a lot. There were some amazing highlights like my Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award, two WOLweeks, meeting my Change Agent Colleagues in the US and speaking on Collaboration and Working Out Loud around the world. I was lucky enough to do some amazing challenging client work in learning, innovation and collaboration. With all of this, new relationships were built and existing relationships were strengthened. However the year had its shares of disappointments, frustrations and delays. 

Here are the lessons I learned (or was taught again) in 2016:

Hustle: Everything worth having takes effort. Hustle is the price and we never stop paying. 

Relationships Are Everything: the best work and learning we do together. You find great work through your networks. Work out loud to find and deepen relationships. When things get good, invest in others. When things get tough, call on your friends and connections. 

Shiny New Things: Shiny New Things are great when they are at the edges. Don’t get distracted by them. Don’t get over enthusiastic about them. Don’t make them the core of what you do until tested. Beware the person dangling a Shiny New Thing before you. It’s likely they don’t understand the dangers, no matter how well they sell it. 

There’s Always More Context: You can always learn more. Dig deeper. The better you understand the context. Surprises, disappointments and confusion are reminders to get more context. Some times you discover things are better than you think with more context.  Other times more context will save you. Make sure you share enough context to help others to succeed.  

Think Product: Products are easy to buy. Products are designed for ease of use. Products have a clear customer and a clear benefit. Products can be tailored. At as attractive as complete flexibility is, people want to know what they are getting and that it works. Products offer that promise. The other advantage of products is that they offer focus to the relationships and the hustle. 

Everything is a Test: We learn by doing. Do more. The best failure rate for learning is far higher than my comfort level. 

Give: Everything I have received this year is a legacy of some gift given directly or indirectly. Generosity works. Resist the temptation to make everything a commercial exchange. Don’t worry about the few greedy or unscrupulous people you meet on the path. When you dig deeper into their context, you wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

Have Fun: I shouldn’t need this reminder. Whether working or not, there is more fun to be had. 

Focus on Purpose: You get one go. You need focus. Purpose is the reason for your work. Make it a relentless focus. 

Thanks 2016. I’m looking forward to applying all this in 2017. I’ve already made some changes but I’m sure there’s more to learn. There’s definitely a lot more to be done to make work more human.