Innovation, Collaboration, Learning & Leadership
Day 1 is here
The best way to have an ongoing benefit from #wolweek is to start a working out loud circle.
A wol circle is intimate, personal & private.
A wol circle provides support for your practice of working out loud.
A wol circle will help you discover your purpose.
A wol circle focused you on the contributions you can make.
A wol circle gives you a scaffold on which to build habits and learn.
A wol circle deepens your connection to others.
Gather a few friends and start working out loud.
In a summer job during university I was introduced to Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle as a structure for communication. I’ve used the logic ever since. The lessons of that approach dig me out of all sorts of presentation messes.
Here are the big lessons I’ve learned applying the Pyramid Principle approach to fix communication:
– Remember to have one message: it is surprising how often you see a presentation without a message. These presentations forget to make their point succinctly because they are overfilled with ideas and with elaborate introductions, narratives and evidence
– Structure promotes simplicity: Structure clarifies thinking. Structure clarifies for the listener too. Best of all understanding the structure also makes you more adaptable to change. Only got 5 mins for your half hour presentation? Knowing your key points will help you home.
– Support ideas with evidence: Others forget to support their assertions. In those that do use evidence, in many cases the charts usually tell a different story to the text. Make it easy for your audience to see your evidence.
– Pyramids beats chains: Many presentations are long fragile chains of logic. I’ve seen someone fly around the world only to have the presentation fail at the first question. That presentation depended on all of a long chain of premises. The failure of one idea left all the work bereft. Pyramids stand on other support when one element falls.
Procrastiwork is a term coined by Jessica Hische to describe the work you do when you are avoiding the work you should be doing. This blog often forms a part of my procrastiwork. I love the opportunity to work out loud, to clarify my ideas and the conversations that are spun up from these blog posts. I learn so much from my procrastination that it can be quite addictive.
Jessica Hische’s point in coining the phrase is to point out that procrastiwork is a great hint to the work you should be doing. If you choose that work, it speaks to you. I’ve experienced the power of finding purpose in the work. This blog is a big part of my personal purpose of making work more human and it was through posts here that those ideas were surfaced from my work.
Procrastination can be purposeful if you ask yourself the right questions. Work out loud on the work you do to avoid work. The repeated process of transparency and reflection will help you find insights as to purpose.
In their book Creative Confidence, Tom and David Kelley describe the research of Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale University’s school of management. Amy Wrzesniewski has identified that people view work as either a job, a career or a calling. Whatever your view of work, working out loud can help.
Working out loud in a job
If you view work as a job, work is a way to earn money to pay for weekends, holidays and hobbies. Working out loud is a way to make sure you keep your job through recognition of your efforts and growing skill. Working out loud outside of work can take your hobbies to the point that they become a calling.
Working out loud in a career
If you view work as a career, then you are interested in achievements and promotion. Working out loud makes your work more visible. Sharing your work as it occurs accelerates people’s ability to appreciate your efforts. You can learn faster and build your skills in a network. Working out loud connects you with those who can help you find the next job opportunity.
Working out loud in a calling
If you view work as a calling, then you find work intrinsically rewarding. For this group working out loud is a way to connect with others who share the calling. Working out loud helps you build the community of peers that will take your work to a new level and a wider greater impact.
International working out loud week is from 16-23 Nov 2015. Put working out loud to work helping your job, your career or calling.
‘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 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.
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.
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.
Start getting reading for #wolweek 16-23 November 2015. It’s time to start working out loud now. How are you going to leverage #wolweek? There are lots of options to connect, share and solve.