Tag: Working out loud

The Asymmetrical Advantage of Working Out Loud

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

Working out loud enables others to better understand you and your work. That can be an advantage if it allows you to focus on them.

Working out loud is not close to common. The practice is growing as more people realise the benefits of purposefully sharing their work in progress. However, it a passionate but small community who consistently practice working out loud.

As someone who works out loud a lot, I have seen a particular advantage in the asymmetry of working out loud practice. People I meet often know a lot about what I do. That enables our interaction to focus more on what they do.

There are a number of advantages in my working having been exposed first:

  • Pull over Push: In discussion people will bring up the ideas and work that I have done that they want to discuss. They pull me towards more effective conversation without the hard work of pitching and digging. People choose to interact based on what they already know of my work. That is a better and more useful choice.
  • Trust comes with understanding: the more someone has followed my work the better they are likely to understand my approach and who I am. That provides a sure foundation for our interaction and helps ensure that there are fewer misunderstandings. Ultimately, if they chose to interact on the basis of that knowledge I can be surer that we are likely to have a productive conversation based in deeper trust.
  • Less Talk & More Listening: The less I have to talk to explain myself in an interaction the more I can listen. Listening to another person is a great way to build understanding and connection but our desire to get out the story of our work can get in the way. We all love to be heard.  People enjoy a conversation that is mostly about their work, needs and challenges.
  • More work solving problems: The less time I have to spend on pitching and explaining my work the more time we can spend discussing solutions to problems. Being able to reference already shared work saves time too. Having another person in the conversation who is familiar with your thoughts and approaches can mean both of you can collaborate to solve ideas together.

The Adaptive Nature of Working Out Loud

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

Leveraging our expertise leads us in straight lines to our usual solutions. Leveraging the expertise of a network creates new adaptive possibilities.

The Entropic Silo of Expertise

Expertise is incredibly important to success in business and in life. Talent people will outperform amateurs.  However, without care expertise can create a narrowing of the possibilities to solve problems and improve work.

Expertise usually comes allied to experience. Having done it before, the answers seem obvious. This ability to quickly apply past solutions can lead experts to develop a sense of uniqueness and even ego around their expertise. If it is perceived there is no value asking others or to ask others might imply a vulnerability in expertise, experts begin to experience the entropy of lack of feedback. Working in isolation and implementing familiar patterns without much reflection, the expert is vulnerable to changing needs, changing circumstances and external innovation. Worse still, an expertise that is not shared is trapped in that person’s head and not able to be learned from or leveraged by others. For an organisation, this creates increasing key person risks.

For an expert the requirements of a solution may seem far more complex than for actual users. A simple example is the temptation for a proud expert to design out any risk of failure. This risk aversion reflects their desire to be associated with a superior solution. That solution may also be more expensive, slower and over specified for the actual user.

The Adaptive Nature of Working Out Loud

To change and adapt to our systems, we need to experience vulnerability. We need a lack of clarity and a sense of disequilibrium to force us to reflect on the need for changes to make our work more effective. Working out loud can supply this disequilibrium to push us from our silos of expertise and to consider the diverse ideas and inputs of others.

The disequilibrium of  exposing our expertise to the needs and desires of our users is a highly generative one. Importantly it brings purpose and goals back into the forefront of the expert’s work. Critically too, this form of working out loud can enable experts with different approaches to the same issue to connect across disciplines to develop novel approaches to meet user needs.

Importantly to be vulnerable, we need a safe space to share. Creating a environment in which people have the shared purpose, trust and confidence to work out loud is an essential pre-requisite.  This space might be created in the small group dynamics of a working out loud circle or in a trusted community of peers or even in public. Wherever it is created their will be adaptive leaders who take on the role of maintaining the environment and safety in the group.  They will also play the role of stirring up tensions to force the group to reflect on their networks and other ways of solving challenges. Working out loud needs leaders who can create these safe spaces and also influence interactions to leverage rather than break down under tension.

If your organisation is rich in technical expertise, such as law, engineering, healthcare or any specific business discipline, there is a significant benefit in working out loud to foster adaptation in your experts. Use working out loud to connect your experts to users, other experts and stakeholders and you will see new adaptive potential.

The Privilege of Working Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud
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Not everyone is allowed to work out loud. Those who can must value their opportunities and seek to help others to share.

I was reading an article in the newspaper on the weekend about a new book by Tara Moss on “Speaking Out: A 21st Century Handbook for Women and Girls”. The discussion in the book of barriers to women speaking up and the techniques that can assist caused me to reflect on the barriers many people face in sharing their work out loud.

Not everyone can work out loud. The real pressures that hold people back can be social, gender, hierarchy or the culture of their organisation. For many people, the expectation in their organisation is that someone with their position, role or work will keep silent, do what they are told and just deliver. Something as simple as talking out loud about your work with others is a privilege.

As a privilege, working out loud is something that needs to be used with respect. I have always stressed that working out loud is a choice. We cannot mandate it, because that choice will not suit many and may not be available to all.

As a privilege, working out loud should be used to benefit others. If you can work out loud, you have a contribution to make. Those who can speak out have an opportunity to help others to be heard. Those who can speak out can support others who may face barriers or abuse. Those who can speak out have an opportunity to role model better ways and to fight for changes that give voices to others in their organisation and their society.

If you can work out loud, use that privilege to help others.

Competency vs Capability Mindset: The Organisation

Posted on by simongterry in Learning

Design your organisation for the potential of its people and their capabilities, not the limits of an expertise.

I recently noticed that Capability or Competency? Mindsets matter was the second most read post on this blog. Part of the appeal of that post is that it addresses a critical shift in mindset for those grappling with the new dynamics of the future of work. We stand facing an organisational version of the personal insight Marshall Goldsmith described succinctly as “What Got Me Here Won’t Get Me There”

Competency-led Organisations

The Core Competency concept introduced by Prahalad and Hamel refined a concept that had been strong in management for decades. It is undoubtedly true that organisations compete by being better, more competent, at something than their competitors. However the mindset of being more competent differs from a competency. This subtlety was often lost as core competency flowed into the mainstream of management thinking.

The focus on core competencies created a mindset that organisation gets to choose its competencies as part of a strategic planning process and should set targets for competencies to fulfil its strategy.  While Prahalad and Hamel spoke of the need for organisations to look forward to assess and build their competencies, much of the focus in organisations has been historical. The biggest outcome of the discussion of core competency has been a narrowing of organisational ambition and a focusing of activity on historical strengths. “That’s not our core competency” is more common than “We can leverage core competencies”.

Influenced by themes that go back to the beginning of scientific management, we have turned core competencies into rigid processes, standards and policies. We have judged these competencies by what sustained competitive advantage in past markets. We have spent less time on the changing customer perceptions of value and the ongoing dynamics of the future marketplace driven by new competitors. The list is long of disrupted organisations who felt safe because a new entrant lacked their core competencies. In many cases the infrastructure to reinforce and sustain these core competencies became a burden in their ability to adapt and survive. 

Capability-led Organisations

The Big Learning mindset that pervades the future of work highlights that competitive advantage in the next century is based on the ability to build the capabilities required to compete in an environment of uncertainty. Rather than specifying a fixed goal of competency, we seek to build an open capability to fulfil our strategic intent and our customers’ needs as they arise.

Adapting organisations to foster autonomy, learning and change is what enables people to build the practical capabilities necessary to learn, grow and execute. The process you inherit is less important than the customer insight you gain in working to meet your customer needs. Prahalad and Hamel reinforced that in Competing for the Future their update of the core competencies discussion. The discussion on the need for organisations to build open capabilities that can help manage and drive adaptation.  These capabilities include openness to their networks and environment, collaboration, ability to learn, share and drive change. Critical too is the development of purpose as the new focus for organisational activity and the inherent rationale for groups of people to come together in work to benefit others.

Design for Capabilities

Responsive Organisations need to design for a capability-led response to a uncertain future. They need to develop core Big Learning practices like working out loud, personal knowledge management, adaptive leadership and experimentation. They need to design their organisations to allow individuals and the collective to focus on the realisation of purpose.

This organisational design will leverage networks, transparency, autonomy, experimentation and the inherent motivation of employees in ways that we have not yet seen. Developing a new competency in holocracy, agile, lean product development, design thinking, big data or any other single practice is not enough. An organisation must build the capability to continuously adapt to customer needs in a changing market.

Ultimately, it will also focus organisations more strongly on realising the potential of people, customers and other stakeholders. We need to design our organisations to build the capabilities that realise human potential. That can only help make work more human.

Building the Goodwill of Networks

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Working out loud

Networks give people access to more people than ever before. However, they can also create new inconveniences by allowing people to free ride. Networks are fostered when people are encouraged others to making contributions to others first and to consider in their approaches the value created for others in their requests. These actions, like purposeful and generous working out loud, rebuild the goodwill that free riders consume.

The Network Externality of Free Riders

In economics, an externality is a cost imposed on other people who did not choose to incur it. Free riding is where a person consumes more than their share of a common resource. Every network depends on common resource of goodwill in continuing connection. A common barrier to the development of collaboration in networks is the network externality of thoughtlessness and free riding.

Great networks build up goodwill among the members which facilitates collaboration through trust, shared connection and a sense of reciprocal benefits. Free riders are members of those networks who don’t contribute to the general goodwill. 

The Externality of Thoughtlessnesss

Thoughtless activities in networks consume goodwill because they impose costs on others in the network without any return:

  • Noise: It takes time and effort to filter out noise. Creating noise in networks is costly to everyone. Noise can include repetitive posts, broadcast messages, long rambling messages, diversions from purpose, spam and other forms of low value messages.
  • Laziness: Failing to check that the question you ask has not been answered already or that the answer is not readily available. Let me Google That For You is a great example of a solution to this common occurrence.
  • Confusion: Making a unclear request of the network. In many cases questions are far easier to ask than to answer well. Many people do not think through what others need to be able to answer their query. It takes time and effort to clarify what the issue is and what answers or assistance will be helpful.
  • Selfishness: Making request of others for effort without giving anything back. We have all been asked to help others in our networks. The better requests are respectful of the individual and the network. Most of the requests that come through Linkedin have a clear benefit to the other person but much less consideration on how I might be interested in helping. Responding to these requests takes time and effort which lowers the value of the network and the priority of responding at all.
  • Lack of Follow-through: Making requests that are ambit claims, have unnecessary urgency or where you are not prepared to invest in follow through on the responses others will make. A common issue is when people ask for urgent help and then disappear again without responding to even acknowledge the answers given to their query. 
  • Unclear Benefit: Making unclear offers of benefits. If you suggest something offers ‘exposure’, ‘mutual benefit’, ‘rewards’, ‘an opportunity’ or similar it helps to quantify this in your request. Leaving it for others to discover the meaning of your obscurity imposes costs on others and on you.

There are many more examples. While it may be easy to decline all poorly framed requests, some times opportunity lurks under the thoughtlessness.  The challenge is that the time and effort to respond, to clarify, to negotiate mutual benefit and to help can unduly burden network participants. Suddenly people withdraw from helping others in the network because the collective experience is burdensome. 

Sidenote: Recognise Your Own Value In Networks

Under an avalanche of requests for free time, free help, free speaking engagements, free advice, offers of ‘exposure’ and general lack of consideration, it can be tempting to decide that you have to acquiesce because the whole system works this way. This is even more the case when you are told ‘everyone else’ seems to be doing things on this basis. We are still learning how to manage relationships at scales, timeliness and distances that have never been possible before in human history. Remember always you have choices. The best way to make choices is to respect the value you bring, set your own strategy and set your own rules for the value exchange. That way you take and miss the opportunities you choose, not others. Ask people you trust to help you assess the value you create, if you can’t do it yourself. Grace, humble respect for the value you create and a focus on reciprocity can make magic happen.

Replenishing Goodwill with Purpose, Contributions and Serendipity

One of the reasons that I am a advocate of John Stepper’s work in promoting the value of working out loud is that John has made explicit the value of making contributions to others. Making purposeful contributions to people in your network builds goodwill. It is a great way to start a relationship. People are more likely to assist you if they have seen you making contributions to others. Most importantly of all to make a contribution to another person you need to take the time to think of that other person and their needs.

Goodwill erodes if it is not actively restored by reciprocal benefits in a network. Creating goodwill through consistent contributions to others and serendipitous benefits helps the networks deliver net benefits to participants overcoming the costs imposed by the thoughtless and the deliberate free riders. The more people make purposeful contributions to others the more likely the balance will be a net positive one. For this reason many early online forums excluded lurkers in an effort to foster purposeful participation and reciprocity. The champions, change agents and connectors at the heart of your network will be some of the most purposeful, considerate and generous individuals that you know.

Fostering a culture of working out loud that is purposeful and generous will help any network overcome the challenges of occasional free-riding.

Algorithms Work Out Loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Whether we like it or not, working out loud is coming as a work trend. The benefits for productivity, learning and effectiveness from working out loud make greater transparency and connection in our work inevitable. If we do not work out loud, it will be our tools that work out loud for us.

Algorithms Ascendant

If you have any interest in digital trends you will have noted the news that software beat the world’s best Go player 4-1. I’ve played a little Go and even at a much smaller scale than a competition board it is a mind-bendingly tricky game that relies on intuition as well as logic. Software being able to beat a Go master so comprehensively is a significant development because analysts had forecast it could be up to a decade before Go fell. Go is too complex for a simple brute force strategy of computation of possible paths. 

The breakthrough occurred because the Google team developing AlphaGo didn’t just rely on one source of technical expertise or one strategy to beat a Go Master. AlphaGo improved itself by testing multiple strategies in machine learning, specifically learning better models of play each time it watched or played a game of Go.  AlphaGo’s success reflected a key benefit of working out loud – learning through observation and experience of not just one’s own practice but also the practice of other Go algorithms and Go masters.

Algorithmic Insight

Whether we practice working out loud or not, the software around us is already beginning to leverage our work to learn and enhance its effectiveness. Social media sites are all moving to algorithmic display because they can leverage our behaviour and relationships to better meet our needs (& their own business models).  I remember my resistance when Yammer first implemented an algorithmic feed and moved away from following. I thought there was no way that I would value the algorithms choice of messages over my own curation of content through following strategies. These concerns passed quickly in use and it has been a long time since I reflected on the need for a better following model.  Incidentally, Yammer moved to this change as a result of analytics and A/B testing, leveraging the work of thousands of customers to find better ways to build its product.

These algorithms are coming deeper into our work. I recently had a demonstration of Microsoft Office’s Delve and Delve Analytics. My takeaway was here was that I was looking at the potential for algorithms and analytics to turbocharge the value by leveraging a form of passive automation of working out loud. Clearly tools like Delve can help by reducing search, however they can also deliver further benefits for learning, collaboration and business value by helping make working out loud a default practice in the future of work.

Delve offers a key way to address the concerns many critics of working out loud raise. Today working out loud requires an individual to push their work out visibly so that others can pull the work for the purpose of learning or collaboration. That first push upsets some critics as it is seen as contributing to noise, raising the possibility of unconstructive distraction or requiring incremental effort from the worker. My experience is that the benefits far outweigh this minor inconvenience.  However, algorithms and analytics like Delve, change this game by leveraging our working behaviours to pull information and insights from the work of others and make them available to enable us to better learn or to find better practice. 

Solutions like Delve enable all of our working out loud practice to rest on a pull model. If Delve can surface a document that I need to see or I can use from the work of my peers then it doesn’t rely on any more effort from my peer that to enable this sharing and configure privacy and security settings. If Delve Analytics can help me to learn how better to use Microsoft’s productivity tools by supplying insights on my use and that of my peers, then again it does not require my colleagues to measure, document and share their approaches. A similar example is that Swoop Analytics have now released Swoop personas to enable each user of an enterprise social network like Yammer to understand their personal style and effectiveness in the use of the platform. 

The trajectory of innovation is that these algorithms will be increasingly effective and increasingly deeply integrated into our products.

Is that it?

If algorithms are the answer, it that it? Do we no longer need the human practice of working out loud? Why don’t we just wait?

There is an adoption challenge of sorts with the coming algorithms. Algorithms can help with insight, but they cannot address the human side of openness to learn, willingness to experiment and ability to handle the social elements of working out loud.  We all need to learn to be able to manage new practices and to have mindsets to be able to benefit from the change.  These mindsets stretch from an attitude of generosity, desire for connection, a move from reliance on personal expertise and through to the ability to handle odd moment of embarrassment. If we do not get the mindsets right, then we will miss the benefits of new ways of working.

The value of the practice of working out loud now is that it enables each of us to learn important social skills in the network era: building connections, reciprocity, generosity and how to create and sustain the creation of value in networks.  The networks and the algorithms are not going away. The challenge for all those seeking to be ready for the future of work is to learn how best to leverage these new models.

Just like AlphaGo, those who are already working out loud are discovering new practices and approaches to work through their own work and through watching the practices of others. You can wait for an algorithm to arrive to make the change for you or you can get ahead of the curve and enhance your practice of working out loud.

Share Your Development Plan Out Loud.

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Working out loud can accelerate development. Share your Development plan with your team. They know your weaknesses already and they are in a great position to coach and support your learning.

When I worked in corporate life, I always managed to shock a few of my colleagues, both peers, team members and others, by sharing my development plan openly with them. My thinking was pretty simple. The benefits of sharing the plan were real.

My colleagues work with me every day. They know my strengths and weaknesses, usually better than I do. They are a great source of coaching and feedback. Sharing my plans with them authorised them to say “hey, Simon, you are doing that thing on your plan”

Acknowledging that I am trying to develop and sharing how was a great way to gain their trust and their support in the changes I was seeking to make. People valued the honesty and the effort to improve. People that I mentored valued the insight into how I put together my plan and where my efforts went. People went out of their way to give me suggestions and to work with me when their development needs were aligned. Peers and my teams also held me to account to do what I had openly committed to achieving. Most importantly, I was publicly role modelling what I asked them to do each day.

In addition, being explicit on when I was hoping to move roles and where I was hoping to go next helped the team around me to understand how they needed to develop and what opportunities that they might have ahead. Instead of succession planning being a mystery, it could be an open conversation in the team. 

Take your development plan. Remove anything that is truly confidential or relates to others. Then share it will your colleagues. Get ready for some great conversations to help you and your peers grow.

The little gesture #wol #vmm

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Working out loud

Your gifts don’t need to be big. They just need to be gifts. 

I saw a neighbour driving in the street this morning. Being Australian males, we both raised a hand of acknowledgement. Two little waves made a gesture of greeting and respect. In regional Australia, the gesture is refined down until only a finger is raised from the steering wheel, but it is usually raised to greet each vehicle. 

Little gestures matter precisely because they are small and easy to ignore. Taking the time to recognise others specifically, is part of building community. Anyone can drift anonymously through a large city or organisation. Recognition reminds you that you have peers. 

The genius of John Stepper’s Working Out Loud is his focus on making small contributions to one’s network. All networks are built on these little moments – gifts of recognition, support or respect. Working out loud refines the giving in your networks and build a generous atmosphere of community. 

When I work with clients on enterprise social collaboration, my focus is to bring the conversation down from big set piece projects to these little gestures of community. The first three verbs of the Value Maturity Model, Connect>Share>Solve>Innovate, are foundations created by these small gifts of time, attention or value. Multiply small gifts and you multiply the power of collaboration. Most importantly of all, like a hand wave between neighbours, these gifts can be given everyday. 

Build your community with little gifts. 

May you enjoy the season of giving. Merry Christmas and a happy new year all. I look forward to further conversations with you in 2016 about the role of learning, leadership & collaboration in the future of work.

Speak out and Remove Doubt #wol

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” Abraham Lincoln

Eloquence can be the enemy of sense. This witty Lincoln quote is an example of the kind of thinking holding people back from working out loud. Why should anyone choose to remain ignorant simply to manage other’s perceptions? Negative perceptions may impede opportunities and relationships but ignorance is far more devastating.

In his defence, when Abraham Lincoln made this comment the cost of access to information was far higher than today. There was a real cost to learning and much lower level of general education.

Today we have the opportunity to learn and share so much more. We have the chance to be open about our process of learning and development as it occurs. Without testing our ideas, we will never come to know our limits and our potential.

Perhaps we would all be better following this advice of Lincoln as others work out loud: ‘He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.’