Category: Working out loud

The Mindfulness of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

‘Pay attention in a particular way – on purpose in the present moment and non-judgementally’ – Jon Kabat-Zinn 

Reinforcing loop

Mindfulness and working out loud go hand in hand. John Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness echoes many discussions of working out loud. We need to be purposeful. We suspend judgement. We focus on what we are doing now. Working out loud is one practice that helps bring a mindful approach to work. 

Working out loud can bring many of the same benefits of mindfulness practices too. In addition to helping us to learn, working out loud improves our openness, generosity, acceptance and curiosity by keeping us in this moment and asking us to practice these very challenges. 

Working Out Loud to Be More Mindful

 
Challenging ourselves to be purposeful in work and to share that purpose with others can help our mindfulness as we go about work. 

Being present in the moment through working out loud helps us to see new opportunities. We begin to see limits to our expertise. We see the value of others. We are guided to see the doors we fly past in the busy challenges of work.  

Sharing that which is incomplete takes a willingness to surrender judgement. We need to turn off all our past issues and our future concerns and share now. Focusing on being present without judgement in our work offers powerful opportunities to learn, to adapt and also to connect to others with new depth.

In busy work lives, mindfulness that can keep us present, open and connected is important to our health and success. The habit of Working out loud can be a part of that practice.

The audience for working out loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

The audience for working out loud is another worker trying to learn just like you. The audience is not the entire world.

Adopting a minimum in viable post is one way that people can overcome the barriers to working out loud. Another is to focus on the audience for your working out loud.

Many people are reluctant to work out loud because they assume their audience is the entire world. They are concerned their work in progress won’t we be appreciated by everyone.

The audience for working out loud is another struggling worker just like you. By sharing your work process, your lessons and challenges, you can significantly help an earlier version of yourself. You can also benefit from the advice of the version of you that’s a little ahead in expertise. If a post adds value to your understanding of your work, there’s a good chance it suits this audience.

There are a number of reasons why focusing on a specific audience for working out loud makes sense:
– all writing is better when the audience is clearer. What you’d write to look good for the whole world won’t be as powerful or helpful a learning opportunity for someone struggling with work challenges like you.
– clarity of the audience will help you determine where to share your work. Share where your audience is. Out loud doesn’t have to be the whole world.
– Even when you share on public social media, you are unlikely to reach a global audience. You are likely to reach people who share your interests. The clearer you are on that audience the better you will be able to attract them. Write for an audience. Write for your network. *
– Clarity of who you are writing for will help your generosity and the clarity of the contributions you want to make in your working out loud. At a minimum, Knowing what mattered to you in your work will help you know what to share to help others

Focus on the audience for your working out loud. It will help you to share and learn effectively.

*Always remember the basic advice of respect, relevance and safety in sharing on social media. These can easily be met with a genuine focus on sharing your learning.

Lower the bar. Share more #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

The minimum viable blog is the least amount of content to communicate an insight and start a discussion.

Many people don’t share their work and ideas because their standards for publishing content are high. Their few posts could run in a newspaper or even a peer reviewed journal. Many people hesitate to work out loud for fear their work is not good enough.

A minimum viable blog is not the end point of an idea. It is a test. By elaborating an idea just enough, the minimum viable blog starts a conversation and draws out more inputs through working out loud.

Lower the bar. Break up your big ideas. Share them regularly in minimum viable form. Start new conversations and learn. Best of all, a regular minimum viable blog is a habit and a constraint. The best creativity is the outcome of consistent practice under constraints.

Learn from the Practice of Work with #wol

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

Working out loud is key practice to move beyond the theory of work. Working out loud helps solve the obstacles of work, tests ideas and creates interactions to keep work grounded in reality.

The most theoretical conversation in the modern workplace is often when a stakeholder says ‘I agree’. What they are actually saying is ‘I agree in principle to your approach given our common theoretical understanding of what you are doing, the absence of obvious obstacles and my limited understanding of the context’. Agreement like that falls apart when practice diverges from theory, obstacles occur or when more context surfaces.

The theory of work diverging from practice impacts more than stakeholder conversations. It is at the heart of breakdowns of many customer experiences, work processes and policies, incentive schemes, restructures, change initiatives and many other domains. In each case as the theory leaves the design table it meets obstacles, exceptions and other challenges in practice.

Some organisations try to eliminate these issues with a stricter adherence to theory. Instead, the defining practice of an effective modern organisation is how it accepts theory’s limitations and focuses on learning the lessons of real practice. Big learning practices take advantage of the organisations ability to learn through each employee’s work and adapt to break the boxes of the theory. Knowing obstacles are the work, organisations plan to learn and adapt. These organisations never get stuck in theory because it is always subject to improvement in a live test.

Working out loud plays a key role in these responsive organisations bridging the gaps between theory and practice. Working out loud puts ideas out for early tests, surfaces obstacles and shares context widely. A stakeholder who says I agree in a process of working out loud has a surer foundation and a better expectation of what is ahead.

Judge the success of your work in practice. Allow for learning and adaptation. Use working out loud to strengthen the culture of learning in your organisation.

The Hypotheses of #wol – #biglearning

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Learning, Working out loud

Working out loud helps us to learn faster by making our hypotheses explicit.

Hypothesis is one of those words that makes something simple sound elegant & scientific. Many digital practices like experimentation and design thinking push people to work and test from explicit hypotheses. It sounds better than draft or work in progress. Using hypotheses and testing them quickly is a core practice of organisations that leverage big learning approaches.

Working out loud can help you to discover the speed, engagement and agility of explicitly testing ideas as hypotheses with your work colleagues. If you are reluctant to share a draft idea, ask for help to validate a hypothesis that shapes how your idea will advance.

Confirming the underpinnings of your work as you go both brings stakeholders on the journey and also enables you to get to the destination faster. Treat every share as an opportunity to confirm that you are on the right track. You will benefit by making small adaptations now rather than rework later. You will also be helping your organisation to practise big learning.

7 Tips to Working Out Loud in Your Organisation #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Here are a seven simple tips to help those who want to encourage the use of working out loud in an organisation

1 Start with why

Working out loud is a change in work practices for your team. People will find it embarrassing, scary and strange. If you want change, you will need to help people to see the rationale. Explain the benefits you hope to see. Connect working out loud to your strategy. Measure and share the successes.

2 Start where your community is

If your organisation talks about work in the tearoom, don’t try to make them work out loud in a brand new technology. You will spend all your energies on the change of technology, before you get to the practices that create value. Put up a poster in the tearoom. Go where your communities currently engage and work there. If you have an enterprise social network all the better, engage its champions and heavy users.

3 Find volunteers

You promised engagement in the social network by December. If you make everyone work out loud, you will get there. Don’t. Forcing people to share defeats the generosity, the learning and the community from working out loud. It increases the chance they will try once and abandon the practice as alien. If I know you are working out loud only to meet an order, I don’t trust you more.  John Stepper starts with career talks to find volunteers for working out loud circles. Start with your volunteers and find champions. Remember you are the first volunteer and should role model the way.

4 Simple Practices

Three simple habits. Working Out Loud Circles. Huddles. Posters with questions. Post-it notes on office doors. Town Halls. Sharing photos of work. Don’t overthink it or over-specify it. Authorised use cases can get in the way of serendipity. There are lots of simple options to help people start and see the benefit.

5 Connect networks

Working out loud circles work because people enjoy the peer support as they learn new practices. How can networks in your organisation reinforce the efforts of your few initial practitioners? Make them role models in your networks to find more volunteers. Go outside the organisation and bring in people to help. The working out loud community are a generous bunch.

6 Have Fun

What’s your version of Working out loud under the stairs.  Take the stress out of the new and different by making it fun.

7 Take time

You won’t get 100% of your people doing anything any time soon. You may never. Take the time it needs for people to learn by doing and to convince each other with their success. Networks will spread success over time.

The declining anxieties of #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Practice reduces the shifting anxieties of working out loud.

At the beginning of our practice when working out loud is new we are anxious about the risks of sharing our work: embarrassment, mistakes and consequences. This is the time of the finger that trembles to push the button on a post.

As practice of working out loud progresses we see our initial anxieties were misplaced. Bad stuff rarely happen. Great things do. Our growing body of work makes each individual contribution less significant in the judgement of others.

Our new issue is becomes the danger that nothing might happen when we work out loud. As practice grows we are anxious about our networks, the quality of our engagement with others and whether we will add value through #wol. At the same time working out loud helps provide a solution to these fears. The transparency, generosity and action helps us to improve our networks, increase our engagement with others and creat value.

Consistent practice goes further still. Now we do more than reduce our anxiety about working out loud. Mastery of working out loud reduces our anxiety about our work and our life. Facing any challenge is far easier when your capabilities are supported by rich and vibrant communities that understand you, your needs and are willing to help.

If you are anxious about your #wol, experiment and keep going. Practice does make perfect.

#wolweek Day 7 – the power of naming

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

We don’t see things as they are. We see them through our intentions. The power of #wolweek is naming our intent and sharing it with others.

Many people work out loud naturally or have done so since social tools became available. They rightly query why we need #wolweek.

The simple answer is it is not for them, except as a celebration of their exemplary efforts. Wolweek is about change in the way people work. If you already work out loud then you also know the majority don’t share your approach.

In Meg Wheatley’s Two Loops model of change and most similar theories of change a key part of the process is naming the change. Why is a name required? We don’t see the world. We see the world through our own intentions. A new name helps engage our curiosity and to open our filters to look at behaviour again in new ways.

If it has never occurred to you or your organisation that almost all work is a collaboration and that all people learn from sharing, then working out loud is a shock to your system and a reason to look again with new intent. The vehemence of the response that all working out loud does is create noise tells me that this shock is working.

If you want people to act differently, you need to help people to look at things differently. Working out loud week is a collective shout to help that to happen.

Building Personal Agency – #Wolweek Day 5

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Change agent just do change. They convey a their personal agency. They intuitively understand they can make a difference with their work. We can spread this sense through working out loud.

Yesterday I spoke about the enthusiasm fostered by working out loud. A key part of that enthusiasm is earning a return on our personal agency. When we share our work we help discover its significance. We also help discover our power. Sharing our work enables others to suggest ways we can do more and ways we can do the things we dream of achieving.

The difference between a change agent and a regular employee is someone once showed them how to make a difference. Working out loud enables that moment. I’ve seen it in #wolcircles. I’ve seen it in working out loud in social and face to face. When people realise they have the power to act and a network to support them the potential of personal agency is enormous.

A reflective mindset helps people create opportunities to exercise their personal agency. Working out loud helps people see not only their work but the process of their work. The community can support them in this reflection with questions, new insights and suggestions.

I’m a firm believer that every employee can improve their work. I’ve seen people transform their personal impact when they take up the challenge to act and are supported to do so. Working out loud week will have given many a taste of this and the energy that comes with it. One thousand #wolcircles will spread that energy and action widely.

Help us carry the energy, enthusiasm and agency of Wolweek forward. Start a wolcircle today. Continue to work out loud. Share working out loud with others.