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.
The power of culture is it changes our behaviours without us always noticing. Take care your culture is not creating exceptions from social norms. If so, transparency will hurt you one day.
Yesterday, I posted on the exception we have in business for the use of arbitrary power that would be unacceptable anywhere else in society. We allow this exception because we see the use of arbitrary power as part of the expected behaviours at work, part of the culture of work. One reader commented that the use of arbitrary power in business seemed ridiculous when you think about it. That’s the problem with culture. Most of the time we don’t examine our expectations. We just align our behaviours.
Over and over again organisations don’t see the issue in their culture until the light of transparency is shined on their behaviours. Suddenly their actions are judged not by their own internal norms and expectations but by the public social norms of the community. Too many organisations are shocked to see their own behaviour in that light.
Before you get caught by surprise by your own culture, open it up to discussion and reflection. Work out loud to engage customers and community outside the organisation. Keep the boundaries of your organisation porous. Listen carefully to the rebels and change agents bringing you news of issues. Most of all do purposeful human work in the real world. That’s the best way to keep yourself honest.
In strategy, we often think of organisations as portfolios of capability. Capability creates options. The set of capabilities in an organisation enable you to do some things and not others. Managing that portfolio to allow for performance, adaptation and growth is critical to success in changing environments.
The same principles apply to learning for individuals in organisations. We can help our people see learning as a way to manage their portfolios of capability. This approach creates options and adaptability for the individual and the organisation. Individuals who manage their own portfolios of capability will have richer and more purposeful careers.
Traditional Learning
Traditional learning approaches borrow from the industrial management mindset. What matters is the role, which is an input in a production process. The role has to have certain fixed capabilities. Therefore we recruit and train our people to have those capabilities.
When something changes, we have a problem. We focused on a fixed role, not the people. We treated people as cogs in a process and hoped we could find or stuff them with the capabilities required for a role. This learning largely happens independent of the individuals purposes, hopes or dreams. Their desire to have a role requires them to learn fixed capabilities.
Managing a Portfolio is Adaptive
Nobody is in perfect identity with the capabilities listed on their role description. We all have diverse portfolios of capability. We have different education, experience and networks. We are hired because we bring more to the role than others.
How often have you seen someone with skills required elsewhere but who doesn’t get to apply them? An IT manager once challenged me to demonstrate that new employee profiles couldn’t help him with his need for a programmers in a particular language. “I know all the programmers here”, he said. The first name that came from a search of employee’s profiles highlighted a financial analyst in the same organisation who had a masters in computer science and had declared their experience in programming in that language. The analyst was unknown to the IT manager. What secret talents are hidden in your employee population?
Let’s manage people, not roles so that we can leverage our individual and collective portfolios of capability. People adapt by drawing on additional skills and capabilities. People can look ahead and learn for the next role or the next challenge. Importantly that allows our employees to manage their own portfolios of capability beyond this role and into their whole life.
A Capability Portfolio Approach for Organisations and Employees
Start with your employee’s needs: Use Design thinking to understand your employee journey before, during and after their time with you. What does a new perspective do to help you change the way you enable them to learn?
Manage a portfolio strategy: You have business needs for certain skills. These become the priority areas for your portfolio of capabilities in the organisation. However, they will not be the only areas you have skills in the team. Re-weight the priorities of the portfolio constantly as the business needs change.
Encourage employees share their full set of capabilities with you. Enable them to disclose the skills and experiences that they have that can help you with your business challenges. Look for options that can be created with these additional capabilities for employees and the organisation. Make capabilities searchable, encourage collaboration and create clearing houses to enable projects to call on those skills as needed.
Let employees develop to their purposes and their needs: If you are clear on your business needs, employees know what skills need to be developed. If they don’t want those skills, it is better they don’t want to stay. Finding the alignment between employee purposes and your portfolio needs will strengthen the organisation
Hire and Encourage Diversity: Diverse people bring diverse capabilities into the organisation. Everyone of these is a future option. That’s an option that comes for free when you hire someone whose capable of doing the job.
Employees are accountable for their portfolios of capabilities: This has always been the case but we lost focus on development in some of the paternalistic HR models. Organisations should support and enable development, but they can’t do it to an employee. Leveraging PKM, working out loud and 70:20:10 models enables employees to take greater control of their learning.
Use employee’s capabilities and watch them grow: The best way for a capability to stay current and grow is to be used. How do you let employees step outside their role and use skills on a project, a secondment, helping out a peer in a collaboration, on a hobby project or volunteering externally.
The public in social media and enterprise social media gets all the attention. However often the greatest connection goes on out of view.
With social media channels inside and outside organisations comes the direct message and the private message. These are key parts of the value created by a network.
Private messages are the communication channels that are most comfortable for many users. These messages don’t offer the value of full working out loud but they can play key roles:
– creating access
– building and deepening relationships begun in public
– exchanging confidential information or additional context
– coaching users
– helping connect community management and community leaders.
In the passion of adopting new public ways of working, we cannot overlook the value of integrated private messages. After all some times the first step to working out loud is sharing something with just one other person.
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.
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.
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.
Diana Renner and I were discussing working out loud this week when Diana mentioned that she had an unpublished blog post in development that I recognised as the feeling of the ‘trembling finger’ when I am about to work out loud. This guest post is a result of that conversation. It is too good not to be widely shared.
–
The Dizziness of Freedom
“…creating, actualising one’s
possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always
involves destroying the status quo, destroying all patterns with oneself,
progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating
new and original forms and ways of living” Rollo May
It has been almost two years since I stepped
into the unknown and became an independent consultant. Looking back, it feels
less like a step and more like a leap. In a single gesture of defiance, I
traded security for freedom, leaving behind a relatively comfortable,
predictable role in a large organisation. I had never expected to end up
working on my own. But the promise of freedom was alluring. It still is. At the
same time freedom opens up possibilities that are terrifying.
In his book The Concept of Anxiety,
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard explores
the immense feelings of dread that accompany that moment when we find ourselves
at a crossroads in life. The moment when the choice to do something hangs in
perfect balance with the choice to do nothing. Kierkegaard uses the example of
a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff, from where he can see
all the possibilities of life. As he looks over the edge, he experiences both a
fear of falling and at the same time a terrifying impulse to throw himself
intentionally off the edge.
Every edge I have stood on has provoked
feelings of dread and excitement. Whether going into a first meeting with a new
client, writing a few pages in my book, or facing a bored and unmotivated
group, I have struggled with what Kierkegaard calls our dizziness of freedom.
Just like Kierkegaard’s protagonist,
staring into the space below, I have contemplated many times whether to throw
myself off or to stay put.
However, what seemed risky and largely unknown
two years ago rapidly has become part of a familiar landscape. It would be
natural to relax and enjoy the view… Yet I have
learned that it is at this very point that I need to become more vigilant than
ever and exercise my freedom to choose in three key ways:
To rally against the safe but numbing comfort of the status
quo. I need to keep reminding myself that the
greatest learning is just outside of my comfort zone. I need to keep stretching
myself to keep growing.
To resist the strong
pull of the crowd. I have found perspective on the
margins, not looking to the outside for approval or acceptance, not following a
trend just because everyone else is following it.
To interrogate the
world’s criteria for what is good or successful. I am suspicious when I am being offered a formula to quick success
or many riches. It is powerful to be able to question mainstream expectations,
and carve my own path with courage and purpose.
The responsibility that comes with the freedom
to choose is terrifying. But the cost of not choosing is even more so.
We need to welcome this dizziness of
freedom as a sign that we are, in fact, just where we need to be. A sign
that we need to slow down and reflect on the risk, then step off the edge
anyway.
Diana Renner – Leadership consultant, facilitator, author of ‘Not Knowing – the art of turning uncertainty into opportunity’, Chartered Management Institute Book of the Year 2015, UK.
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.
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.
Working out loud can be a practice of social media. More importantly sharing work in progress for learning and help is an every day human practice. The value of working out loud is to take that every day practice and make it deliberate, more accessible and more often repeated.
The medium is less important than the creation of human connection when two people share a work challenge. Share their collective insights, knowledge and expertise is what creates the value from working out loud. This human connection will involve concepts like generosity, understanding, learning and trust. These human concepts can happen in many ways that do not involve technology.
As a number of advocates participated in The Enterprise Digital Summit’s Hangout on Air about Working Out Loud today, what struck me was the energy and enthusiasm of the group. All those advocating for working out loud shared their surprise and the energy that they had gained from encouraging others to work out loud. We didn’t need anyone to talk about their enthusiasm. It was conveyed with smiles, the energy in their stories and a strong desire to share and contribute.
That generosity of spirit and enthusiasm extends to the working out loud on the development of the practices of working out loud. A cursory examination of the available material on working out loud highlights that this is a practice that is being defined and refined out loud. Generous people are devoting their thoughts, energies and collaborations to improving working out loud and to make it more accessible for individuals and organisations. Many people are doing this simply because the purpose matters to them and they can make a difference to others.
