Category: Working out loud

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.

Working Out Loud for Engineers

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Working out loud

Working out loud has become a very popular change initiative in engineering organisations around the world. The practice of working out loud plays key roles to nudge the traditional perfectionistic expertise-oriented engineering culture in productive directions towards the agile, customer-centred, collaborative future of work.

Engineering is a rigorous discipline of expertise. It has to be. Mistakes and errors in a design can have dramatic, devastating and long term consequences for the business & its customers. For this reason, engineering expertise is highly valued. That expertise can focus down into very narrow domains of the design of engineering solutions. Solutions are heavily worked, pushed to perfection and at times gold-plated for safety. The demands and focus of this work can mean that attention shifts to the area of engineering expertise itself and less to the environments, systems and other contexts around the work.

As a result, engineering organisations can at times struggle with customer focus. Engineers understand the design far better than the customers. They know the materials, systems and technologies involved better than anyone else.

Engineers can also find collaboration difficult. If there is one expert on a particular solution in the organisation, why would there be any discussion around a design to that solution. Focus primarily on demanding engineering considerations, that expert may be less concerned about the input from sales, marketing or manufacturing into the consequences of design choices.

Working out loud is the practice of sharing work purposefully with relevant communities while the work is still in progress. Sharing ideas, drafts and other progress helps other to be more aware of your work, provide input to that work and to learn from the work that is going on around the organisation. Nudging a culture to be more open, more outcome oriented and more collaborative through the practice of working out loud can deliver significant benefits for individuals and the organisation.

Encouraging engineering teams to work out loud can contribute to nudging the culture in a number of constructive ways:

  • Do we really understand the problem? The business challenge may need engineers to deliver a solution but that doesn’t mean the problem is an engineering problem. Asking teams of engineers to work out loud as the define the problem to be solved can help them to gather inputs to better understand the outcomes needed, the constraints and other systemic issues through the input of the wider organisation or other stakeholders.
  • What ideas might we take into the design process? Many creative solutions are cross-disciplinary or even involve a complete reframing of the problem. Opening up the ideation can allow non-technical experts or experts from other areas to put forward ideas that might inspire a new direction of work. Innovative and effective solutions can be the result of new inspirations.
  • What other considerations matter? Narrating the process of the design and sharing the considerations that went into it opens up a discussion on other considerations that may be missed or might be relevant. Suggestions on things that the engineers might consider can come from anywhere in the organisations.  Some times it is those who know least who ask the best “emperor’s new clothes” questions.
  • Whose support do we need to put this design into practice? To the immense frustration of many engineers, their designs need the support of other stakeholders to be put into practice. Engaging those stakeholders throughout the process of the work through a constructive process of sharing work as it develops will help with the awareness and buy-in of stakeholders in the organisation.
  • How do we learn from implementation for our next work? Henry Petrovski’s To Forgive Design is a book that studies the lessons from major engineering failures. One of the key insights is that failure often happens when a new technology is pushed beyond limits that have not yet become obvious. The technology overcomes a previous limitation but its own limitations are not known yet. These kind of failures can be prevented if the engineers can stay close to the issues arising from the implementation of their work. For example, signs of stress or other unusual outcomes on an existing bridge may be a signal that a new longer bridge with that same design may have an undetected failure point.
  • How do we develop our own mastery? Teams that are rightly proud of their expertise should be seeking to develop a culture of ongoing improvement and gradual development of mastery. This learning culture requires people to seek feedback and coaching from others, to study the work of others and to be challenged by others to learn and work in new ways.

If your organisation can benefit from a more agile, customer-centred and collaborative work, then consider leveraging the practice of working out loud to help nudge those changes.

Tall Poppy Podcast with Tathra Street

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Future of Work, Leadership, Learning, Life & Career, Working out loud

I recently did a podcast with Tathra Street on making leadership safe for humans.  Tathra has an series of interviews on the idea of Human Centred Leadership. In our 30 minute conversation, we discussed my leadership lessons, how work is changing, the demands of digital culture, working out loud and more.

The discussion was great but sadly the audio quality did not hold up to the content of the discussion.

Work Ahead for 2017: Foundations, Personal & Organisational Work

Posted on by simongterry in Change, Collaboration, Future of Work, Innovation, Leadership, Learning, Strategy, Working out loud

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As the end of November approaches, that time has come again when we must consider whether we have the right initiatives in place for ourselves and our organisations as we get ready for 2017.  How are you transforming the capabilities and work practices in your organisation to make sure that your teams are more effective in their work?

Why is Work Changing?

The way we work is fundamentally changing under the influence of five main drivers:

  • Pervasive Global connection: As internet connectivity has gone mobile, we now have the ability to connect with, to converse with and to see the whole system of our stakeholders any time anywhere.
  • Automation: Digital technology has enabled us to automate simple tasks and string together increasingly complex processes and systems.
  • Data and Analytics: As digital connection and digital automation expands so does our ability to gather data and analyse that data to provide insight and run complex algorithmic processes.
  • Changing Consumer Expectations: As consumers are exposed to the potential of digital through consumer technology and consumer services, the businesses must meet disruptive and exacting standards for convenience, service, value and speed.
  • Accelerating Pace of Change: Disruption, greater responsiveness to change and ever-shortening cycles of feedback are the new norm for business and our work practices must adapt to enable our businesses to keep up.

We have already seen great change in digital transformation.

Further dramatic changes in the nature of work are here but ‘not yet widely distributed’ to borrow the phrase of William Gibson..

2017 Future of Work Recommendations

With these pressures on the way we work, every business should have a focus on how it is changing the way its people work and the practices that will support ongoing transformation of work. Here are my recommendations on what work you should have on your backlog for the new year:

Foundations:

These five are in place in your organisation today. However, they may not be well understood, managed or serving your purpose.  As you look to 2017 it is always worthwhile to ensure that the foundations are sound and well aligned.

2017-foundations

Purpose: Be clear on your personal purpose. Look for that purpose in the work you do. Clarify the shared purpose in your organisation. Don’t impose a purpose designed around the leadership table. Discover the purpose through the stories and the work that bring your organisation together.

Strategic Value: What value are you trying to create to fulfil your purpose? What kinds of value matter most to your stakeholders? When do they know you are creating value? What measures tell you that you are achieving your goals?

Networks: To compete in the network era, your organisation must be networked. How are you bringing people together to connect, to share, to solve problems and to respond to the networks around your organisation? The technology matters less than the connection, the behaviours and the shared purpose. Are you clear on the strategic value of your communities, are they well supported with sponsorship, investment and community management so as to accelerate their value creation?

Culture: Move beyond words on a poster. Move beyond generic platitudes. Move beyond an agglomeration of individual team cultures. What specific values are shared across your organisation? Why do these help fulfil your purpose? How do those values translate to expectations about behaviours in and across your teams? Is the culture in your organisation effective for your purpose and the value you are seeking to create? How do you personal role model the behaviours you expect from others?

Employee Experience: Are you working somewhere that values the employee experience and is adapting it to changing work and changing roles in the organisation? How have you aligned your employee experience to your desired customer experience? Does your workplace create rich value for employees and enable them to express their potential in fulfilment of purpose? Does your employee experience work as well for the one-hour temporary contract worker as the long term employee? Does it work equally well for all levels of the hierarchy and all corners of your network?

Personal Effectiveness:  Four Key Future of Work Practices

These four personal practices are enablers of the future of work. They enable an individual employee to deliver greater value in their work by responding to the opportunities and information in their environment. Agile and adaptive they empower employees to continuously improve and innovate.

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Working Out Loud: Sharing work in progress in a purposeful way with relevant communities will accelerate learning, sharing and feedback cycles. Start working out loud now.

Personal Knowledge Management: Learn how to turn the personal information flood into effective sense making, learning and sharing. A critical skill to make sense of complexity and to leverage networks for learning.

Adaptive Leadership: Enabling the rebel and the change agent to lead more effectively in any system. Improving understanding, influence and the increasing the breadth of leadership techniques to create collective change in any system.

Experimentation: Move beyond the limits of your expertise. Learn by doing. Resolve uncertainty through action. Shorten cycles of decision making and feedback to increase personal effectiveness.

Organisational Effectiveness: Scaling & Accelerating Change

Organisations are made up individuals. These four practices of organisational effectiveness scale and accelerate the personal practices through a focus on design of systems for connection, learning and adaptation.

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Open Collaborative Management: Middle managers are often those who find a change to digital ways of working most threatening and disrupting. Open up the work of management. Move management from planning, allocation and control to facilitation, alignment and coaching. Shorten cycles and improve the performance value of feedback. Foster the role of managers as network navigators and brokers. Management can be a critical point of leverage in achieving more open, more collaborative and more effective work.

Scalable Capability Development: Turn each employee’s learning into a contribution to scalable system for delivering strategic value. Create Big Learning systems that scale learning around strategic capabilities for the organisation’s success. Coordinate your learning agenda as an agile change program. Curate the capability building of your teams, leveraging learning from peer communities and leverage social learning to bring 70:20:10 and a performance-oriented approach to learning to life at scale and in the workplace.

Effective Networked Organisations: Take advantage of the networks in and around your organisation to rethink your business model and organisational design choices. Break the centralised/decentralised binary and move beyond hierarchy. Enable autonomy, foster alignment and improve effectiveness for purpose. Skill your teams to achieve effectiveness in the wirearchy. You don’t need to purchase a new management system. You need to adapt your approach to managing knowledge, trust, credibility and results to your purpose, culture and community.

Agile Innovation & Change: Adapt to the changing needs of the environment and stakeholders to deliver new value. Accelerate innovation and change through new approaches and by putting in place the systemic support for employee-led innovation, change and transformation to a more responsive organisation.

Simon Terry provides consulting, advice, speaking and thought leadership to global clients through his own consulting practice, and as a Charter Member of Change Agents Worldwide, a network of progressive and passionate professionals, specializing in Future of Work technologies and practices.  The focus of Simon’s practice is assisting organizations to transform innovation, collaboration, learning and leadership. 

Just Start: Working Out Loud in #WOLWEEK

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Working out loud

What are you going to do today to share your work in progress in a purposeful way?

simongterry's avatar#wolweek

It is never too late to take advantage of International Working Out Loud week (7-13 November 2016).  All you need to do is start sharing your work purposefully.

The week before Working Out Loud week is always a busy one.  The most common topic of conversation is “is it too late to do something ?”  My answer is always the same “No, let’s do it.”  The theme this Wolweek is “Working and Sharing Purposefully”. That applies to how we promote working out loud during the week too.

People often want to overthink and overplan working out loud. They want to do it exactly right. They want to know they are doing it in the authorised way.  They want to know exactly what will happen when they share their work before they do so. They want to know what method of starting working out loud in their organisation will work best for…

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Word Gets Around – Reputation and Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work, Working out loud

People often worry about working out loud because they believe the practice poses a risk to their reputation. In the modern networked workplace, it can be a greater risk to have no reputation or one chosen only by others.

Working Out Loud involves purposefully sharing work in progress so that others can learn and contribute. Many people used to traditional ways of working where only final artefacts are shared see this as a risk to their reputation.  They are worried that experiments, errors, revisions or even the confusion of the development of work might reflect badly on their expertise. They worry that their reputation may suffer if they share their work before it is perfect.

Reputation is an important component of the networked workplace. As our work becomes more agile and dynamic we need to make decisions on who has authority, who we can trust and who influences our decisions. Reputation plays a key role in influencing these calls.

However the best reputations are based on stories of actual work. They aren’t based on a  marketing pitch. You get a reputation not just because of the output you produce but how you produce it. A good reputation is rarely one of how someone perfectly executes 100% of the time without drama. Those stories are too unreal and too boring to share. Great reputations are people who solve problems, engage others and demonstrate their abilities working through challenges and triumphing in the end.

Surprising your stakeholders by sharing some of your challenges may be risky but it is far riskier to pretend you have none. Pretence is the way reputations are destroyed.  Building a deeper relationship by purposefully sharing the work, seeking input and creating solutions to challenges together will make your stakeholders an engine of a positive reputation.

Many people who are worried about reputation actually create for themselves the opposite risk. They share nothing of their work. That silence is not filled by people saying good things about their work. With nothing specific to attract attention or to discuss, most people won’t say anything at all. In a sceptical world, the absence of a reputation is bad news.  The silence that is created is filled by people talking about other topics or worse talking from ignorance of what is going on and why.

Word of your work gets around. To build a strong and healthy relationship, you want discussion of your work. Shape the views and conversations about your work purposefully through working out loud.

International Working Out Loud week is from 7-13 November 2016.  See wolweek.com for more details.

#WOLWeek: 7 Days of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Working out loud

7 Days worth of practice of working out loud for the upcoming #wolweek

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As International Working Out Loud Week approaches on 7-13 November 2016, many people want to experiment with working out loud in their networks and their organisations. Here’s how to use the 7 days of International Working Out Loud Week underway and to set up your working out loud practice ongoing.

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We know new practices are best learned through experience and consistency of practice.  Using a practice consistently is the way to iron out the kinks, to learn what works for you and to build new habits.

Here are seven days’ worth of actions to get you started on working out loud during working out loud week.

Day 1: Share a Purpose

Choose some purpose that is important to you to make the focus of your #wolweek efforts. This purpose may be delivering a great outcome in a project for a group of stakeholders or it could be a personal ambition…

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Working Out Loud: Sometimes Nobody Knows

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work, Learning, Working out loud

Working Out Loud surfaces the hard, the difficult and the uncertainty of work. The value it delivers begins with what we usually hide. Transparently sharing work in progress reduces the stress of uncertainty.

When you see the work around you in the form of polished artefacts, the performance of others can be intimidating.  The glossy output gives no signal of how hard it was to put together, how much effort was involved or even the doubts and uncertainties of the creator. We can feel like others are so much more talented and accomplished because they don’t share our doubts and uncertainties about work.

This morning on the radio a musician, Emma Louise, was telling the story that her big surprise when she meets other musicians to talk about work is the discovery that everybody is uncertain about what they are doing. She described the relief in knowing she was not alone in her doubts.

This is not just a challenge for creative arts. In many workplaces one of the commonest forms of stress is the pressure to hide one’s own doubts and uncertainties about work.  Nobody else is sharing any doubt so your own feels wrong.  Hidden behind all the artefacts is a whole lot of confusion.

Working Out Loud brings work in progress out into the open.  While it will raise anxiety at first to share one’s shortcomings, doubts and concerns, my experience is that it is exactly like the conversation that Emma Louise describes.  Others emboldened by openness and vulnerability will admit their own doubts and concerns. Soon we find out that those we most admire and are most intimidated by have a little part of their work where they are just ‘making it up as they go along’.  Collaborating together to support one another, to share skills and to close gaps is a powerful way to tighten a team and reduce the intimidating barrier of perception.

If you are concerned to admit that you don’t know the answer through working out loud, remember sometimes nobody knows. You may just have to find the answer together.