Tag: Working out loud

Guest Post: The Dizziness of Freedom by Diana Renner

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Diana Renner and I were discussing working out loud this week when Diana mentioned that she had an unpublished blog post in development that I recognised as the feeling of the ‘trembling finger’ when I am about to work out loud.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.

www.notknowingbook.com
www.notknowinglab.com
Twitter: @NotKnowingLab

#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.

#Wolweek Day 4 – The Human Spirit of Sharing

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

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.

That’s a uniquely human spirit 

Building Real Relationships – Working out loud and Sales #wolweek

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Working out loud has a great potential to help with sales. However the help is not in the way most people expect. Sales people don’t need more marketing to low probability prospects. The value of working out loud for sales is the ability to participate generously in client’s work and to know when best to engage them. Working out loud is a way to build real relationships with clients that help them do their work better.

Forget the Spruiking

Many people initially see working out loud as a way to market their work. This marketing mindset leads them to share work as a way of bragging, highlighting their offers and generally pushing messages at clients and prospects.

The key problem with all marketing is that we don’t know when clients are ready to buy. This is why so much marketing has low single digit conversion rates. The vast majority of it is wasted because it arrives at the wrong time for the potential purchasers. Adding sales people to this push message strategy does not improve performance and can be a huge waste.

One of the key ways to improve sales effectiveness is better targeting of sales time to higher value prospects. Too much sales time is already wasted where there is no chance of a deal. A sales person can’t devote their time to low single digit prospects of success.

Work out loud to help Clients, not your Business

The majority of my business opportunities come from referrals or clients discovering my work when they need it. As a result my sales time is better spent where it can be most effective.

Genuine working out loud builds relationships of trust in networks. Deep and wide relationships of trust help sales people to be more effective. Sales is not a solo activity. The best sales people collaborate with their organisation, partners and client prospects continuously. Every sales person wants to expand and deepen their network and giving to others to help their work through working out loud is a key way to build the reach of that trust.

Working out loud with referral partners & client influencers is a key first step. These partners will understand clients and may have related goals. Helping these partners to do their work better through working out loud can enhance your understanding of client opportunities and your ability to convert them. Sharing your work in this exchange will help referral partners to better understand your abilities. Before you ask for a favour it always helps to do one.

Any sales person loves to know what their clients are doing. Helping your clients by finding ways to work out loud directly with them on their goals is a great opportunity. You will not be marketing your product and service. You will be a trusted partner sharing ways that they can achieve their personal and work goals. Creating a working out loud circle with clients or prospects is an opportunity to deepen relationships, understand the other and put some value into that relationship.

Highly effective sales people identify a customer’s problem and solving it in ways that create new value and support an ongoing relationship. They start by understanding others and making contributions, not marketing. That sounds like working out loud to me.

How do we make #wolweek more valuable? – Day 1

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Our third International Working Out Loud week from 15-21 June 2015 is raising some familiar questions. This post is to share the current work to address these questions and invite some help in making sure that we are helping everyone get the most value out of #wolweek and the practice of working out loud. I would love your input because I think there is more we can do.

Here are the five commonest questions and the current attempts at answers:

  • How do I work out loud or get involved with #wolweek?  
    • To understand working out loud read John Stepper’s Five Elements of Working Out Loud.  Then buy his new book.  
    • If you want to understand the history, there is a family tree of #wol which is built from Dennis Pearce’s PHD dissertation that supplies all the details. Because the working out loud movement is focused on sharing and aren’t big on doctrinal disputes, nobody is claiming ownership and we embrace all related movements, especially #showyourwork. 
    • You may already be sharing your work which is great. Just make sure it is work in progress and your intent is a generous community oriented one – helping others to learn and to help you. Self-promotion might be valuable but it is not working out loud (& is much more likely to be treated as unhelpful noise)
    • To get involved, share some work in progress any way you want with others for them to learn or to help.
    • You don’t need to use technology, a hashtag or even be that public. Share with at least one other person and you are involved.
  • Why is there a week? Shouldn’t people do this every day?
    • The week is to promote the sense of community that comes from working out loud.  
    • People can experience that community in a week and can learn more about working out loud.  Hopefully people try it ongoing. 
    • The week is only a beginning and not a limit to the practice. We would love people to practice every day (we have suggestions on how to start daily practice too!)
  • Who is behind #wolweek? And who is making money from this?  
    • International Working Out Loud Week is not officially aligned with any organisation and is the barest network collaboration itself. 
    • International Working Out Loud Week is a collaboration of Austen Hunter, Jonathan Anthony and I. We loosely coordinate our activities by working out loud. We started with a conversation in a public forum and we still haven’t had a meeting or used email. We are each authorised to act to advance the organisation. We chat occasionally. That’s all the organisation we need.  
    • So far the only money involved over 3 International Working Out Loud weeks is the sub $80 budget spent on supporting the wolweek site. Nobody gets a salary as we are all volunteers just like our passionate community. There is no income because no money changes hands. No profits were harmed in the making of #wolweek.
    • If other people can benefit from wolweek because they have a product or services to sell, that’s fantastic because it all reinforces working out loud.
  • What is a #wolcircle? Why do we need 1000?

To make #wolweek valuable in its goals in promoting working out loud, we need to address these and other issues well.  We also need to ensure that we are giving people confidence to act on their new practice and advocate for the movement. The best International Working Out Loud week is one where the movement develops ways to engage others and create ever greater value from learning & collaboration.

What else can we do or say? How can we create greater value from this and any future #wolweek? Work out loud with us in the comments or on a social media network.

On the Shoulders of Giants – #wolweek

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

We do our best work together. 

 ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants’ – Isaac Newton

On The Shoulders

My best work builds on the ideas of others. I am supported in my work by networks of people who give generously of their ideas their time and their networks.

Working out loud helps me to better leverage these networks and leverage their boost up to see just a little further. Sharing work in progress makes it open to the contributions of my network of giants. 

#wolweek is a chance to share that experience with others. This wolweek we begin a campaign to create 1000 working out loud circles so that 5000 people can benefit from the lift of others in their network in achieving a goal that matters. 

Of Giants

If you depend on giants for your view, you need to remember to feed them. If you only take from the giants, they will walk away leaving you alone.

When working out loud is practiced with generosity, you give back to others. The network gets its return and the giants will stay around to hold you up.

#wolweek is for me a chance to give back to all those who have supported me. Some of these are the inspirations and thought leaders that I try to recognise in the social streams. Others are the leaders and contributors who advocate and make change happen.

Hopefully as #wolweek grows we can give back to a wider global community too. 

Spreading the practice of working out loud will foster a mindset of making contributions to networks. That’s why spreading #wolcircles is important. A #wolcircle participant can’t be selfish in working out loud. They must give and take. 

In a globally connected world we all stand on the shoulders of giants if we work out loud with generosity.

One Thousand #WolCircles

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

1000 Cranes bring peace. 1000 #WolCircles connect people in purpose.

Great things happen when people embrace a bold dream. For some time John Stepper and I have been discussing how we make his wonderful work enabling others to work out loud available to more people.  John has developed a great facilitation process using circles of 4-5 people to support each other as they work out loud. I have led a circle and the outcomes were invaluable. At a recent event, John’s talk on the value of working out loud inspired the establishment of 18 circles.

First Working Out Loud event at another firm helped launch *18* peer support groups aka #wolcircles cc: @pkmchat @simongterry @chriscatania

— John Stepper (@johnstepper)

May 27, 2015

It is time to dream big. We want to create a 1000 circles so that over 5000 people can fulfil some important personal goal with the support of a circle of peers. The circle process is free and publicly available. These circles share the practices of working out loud in a purposeful way. They also give people an opportunity to reflect on what matters to them, what relationships they need to foster and how to give generously to others.

So our plan is to create 1000 working out loud circles between the International Working Out Loud Week next week from 15-21 June to one we will hold in November this year.

How you can help

I look forward to working with you to share 1000 #wolcircles around the globe

Written to A Recipe or Written to Help?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Writing this blog has made me particularly susceptible to the many posts floating around social realms with advice on writing blogs. I love advice and I am always interested to learn from others. I have found some gems. I have found a lot of dross. 

Write to a Recipe

However, I am surprised how many recommend the same recipe in their advice:

  • choose one single narrow topic for the blog
  • intensively research the SEO keywords for that topic and similar blogs
  • write posts that heavily use the keywords and link to the other successful blogs, ideally with an arrangement for reciprocal links
  • when a post is successful write similar posts over and over again and promote them heavily
  • write headings that are catchy, use lots of images, use lists, numbers, write to an ideal word length, and a thousand other pieces of technical writing advice that are about as definitive as a horoscope
  • write a fixed number of posts per period (the numbers and periods always vary)
  • there is lots of advice on how to make the post a marketing piece but never any advice on how to have an insight worth sharing or how to make sure that your post is useful to anyone else.

These posts, which mostly follow their own advice, are often lightweight and usually impossible to finish. They may attract shares and organic attention but they are dull and they are all the same. I’ve never had any interest in their authors because the post may be good at creating an audience but they are a terrible for business.

Write to Share

I can make no claims to have special insights into what makes a successful blog. This isn’t a high traffic blog and the small growth in attention over time has been purely organic. The few posts that have been well shared are more accidents than outcomes of design. The only common elements of those accidental successes is that I had something I wanted to share, I spoke from the heart and I otherwise had little regard for the recipes.

The blog is achieving its goals because I am writing as a process of reflection and a way to share those reflections out loud. Importantly, my friends, colleagues and clients find it a great way to get to know me, how I work and how I think

Because I am focused on sharing my learning with others who it may help, this blog:

  • wanders across a diverse but related range of topics with a common focus on my work of making work more human
  • each post is based around an insight or a moment that I want to explore and to share. That also means I write when I have an insight to share.
  • Because I want to understand how new insights fit into my existing knowledge, many of the links are internal to this blog, to people whose ideas I respect or to the reference sources that triggered the insight
  • I seek to speak in my own voice and share my own views as plainly and as simply as I can
  • Because neither I nor you have a lot of time, I prefer to be concise.

Friday night, I ran into an acquaintance who told me he had shared a post that I wrote about my career transition with three friends going through similar experiences. The reason I wrote that post was to help others facing the same experience. That anyone thought the post would help others is more than enough reason to write & share it. Working out loud might be messy at times and it probably won’t meet any external criteria for success, but every story like that tells me that the blog is creating the kind of success that I want.

The Double Loop Learning of Working Out Loud

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

Today I presented a case study at Learning Assembly Australia (#learnaus) on my personal practice of working out loud.  Like many such presentations, we were soon discussing the value of working out loud on the practice of working out loud. We needed the help of my #wolweek colleague, Jonathan Anthony, the master of meta when it comes to working out loud. 

However, there is an important reason working out loud commonly creates this experience. Working out loud fosters double loop learning.

The Double Loop

The concept of double loop learning is expounded in Chris Argyris’ classic article ’Teaching Smart People How to Learn’. Argyris contrast double loop learning with the single loop of every day problem solving.  He expresses double loop learning this way:

if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right.

Working Out Loud Facilitates Double Loop Learning

When you narrate work in progress and do so visibly, you expose to others the single loop in process. Suddenly your behaviours, context, assumptions and approaches are open for review.  When you begin to answer questions or respond to suggestions of others on your work, you are prompted to reflect on the approach you have chosen. This process of reflection on how you are working opens up double loop learning.

Many people discover the presence of others is not even required for double loop learning to occur.  The process of getting your work visible and shareable can help you to realise new and better ways of achieving your goals. This process can also cause you to reflect on your role in the wider system with whom you are about to share your work. There is nothing quite like the challenge of expressing your thoughts to straighten out your thinking.

The power of double loop learning is that it can help realise breakthrough change in your personal effectiveness. By clearing the blockages, assumptions and other constraints that you have imposed on yourself, your work effectiveness increases. New avenues for learning open up.  Importantly, learning accelerates because the work & the reflection accelerate.  The faster you move around both single and double learning loops the greater the progress towards mastery.

Working Out Loud is a reflective practice. Use it to develop your double loop learning. Working Out Loud is a practice to help ‘learn how to learn’.