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Next week is International Working Out Loud Week (5-11 June). For the week, a global community of working out loud practitioners, advocates and organizations will share their work, their lessons, and their stories.  This WOLWeek the theme is “Contribute and Create Value”.

We created Working Out Loud week to draw attention to working out loud. Importantly, we also wanted to authorize people to share their interest in or passion for working out loud.

In corporate life and in social situations, we can often worry whether we have the authority or the permission to share. Our actions are tightly constrained. Acceptable behaviour is tightly defined. Speaking out in a different way to one’s peers can be hard and discouraged. The goal of WOLWeek is to give people one little period where they have one degree of freedom to change.

Your organization may not support working out loud. Your peers may not understand working out loud. However, each individual can fight for one more bit of freedom to change using WOLWeek.  We can do so by announcing that we are joining a global movement, celebrating a recognized event and sharing the stories that will surface over the week.  The global community and conversation around WOLWeek is designed to give everyone just a little latitude to do differently for the week, to explore change and to experience the benefits of a different approach.

The transparency, collaboration, and learning of Working Out Loud are all important future of work practices. WOLWeek gives you a chance to take yourself and your organization a small step into this change.

Take it. Work out loud. Show your work to others. Invite others to learn from you and to help you achieve your goals. That small step into change under the umbrella of WOLWeek might just lead you and your organization into an extraordinary transformation.

Working Out Loud Week is from 5-11 June 2017. For more information see WOLWeek.com or WOLWeek on Twitter.

Opportunities for distraction are everywhere. Organisations need to stop fighting the war for attention internally. If you need to fight over the attention of your employees you have a performance management problem, not an attention problem.

The War For Attention

We are familiar with the battle for our attention in all aspects of our lives. We are slammed by marketing & communication messages everywhere. The globally connected always-on world means people are now seeking escape from the buzz of demands on their attention. Digital downtime once meant waiting for slow computers. Now people are taking time offline away from the alerts. The volume of and channels for these messages keep increasing. Scott Belsky of Airbnb has described our mobile phone notifications as a tragedy of the commons where excessive use and bad behaviour is devaluing the platform for everyone.

Filtering out the attention grabbers is critical work now for each of us to manage our personal effectiveness.  Making careful choices of tools, their settings and using personal knowledge mastery skills is important for anyone to stay sane, let alone be effective in their lives and work. Importantly, the set of choices that make each individual effective is unique to the individual, their context, and community. The tools and techniques can help individuals to better manage attention and personal effectiveness, but there is no one size that fits all and continuous adaptation is required.

Fighting for Attention Internally

In the paternalistic, hierarchical, and efficiency-oriented culture of organisations, the war for attention is an issue that must be solved centrally with the right set of corporate drains on employee attention. Carefully crafted intranets and corporate communication messages present the central view of what needs to be known. A great deal of time and effort goes into planning, coordinating, preparing and approving the official flow of information inside organisations. Many central functions and middle managers exist to do this work.

Other agile, dynamic and relevant ways of exchanging information are shut down. Technology teams are on the lookout for new tools to blacklist. Employees are often prohibited from using more effective ways of interacting to ensure that messages go through the ‘right channels’, often people or choke points in the power structure.  This desire for control is  presented as being in the best interest of employees – minimising distraction, time-wasting, clutter or confusion in messages. This culture of seeking to manage and control employee attention results in a profusion of “what to use when” guides that can help the novice user but can also become prescriptive barriers to effective work, especially in highly compliant cultures. We don’t need ‘what to use when’ guides in our personal life, Stowe Boyd has highlighted that despite the battle of attention and potential confusion, we can cope with a lot of different tools & channels.

Much of this fight for employee’s attention is unproductive work. Few intranets are highly performing communication platforms despite the investment and enforced lack of competition. Corporate email opening rates aren’t good enough to ensure all the relevant messages are received. Mandatory compliance training is largely counterproductive. Powerpoint isn’t always an effective communication tool.

Most organisations are still more concerned by what their employees don’t know than what they do. Rumours and myths spread effectively because information is so tightly managed. Even if it was possible to turn your organisations systems into a complete information autarky, employees would still look at their own devices. The human community is filling a social vacuum.

We have to ask why organisations want to manage their employees’ attention and why employees resist. For both sides, the fundamental issue traces back to the historical culture of paternalistically determining what work it is efficient for employees to do. If we don’t trust our employees to use their time and attention well, then other more senior people need to decide it for them. Knowledge work does not fit well into these models of productivity inherited from manufacturing. Outputs are not simply determined by inputs. Human network relationships matter. Diversity of ideas is valued over the uniformity of a corporate line.

The problem is not distraction. The problem is the determined effort to centralise and control information that presents relevant information being available at the right time with the right human network filters of trust, relevance, insight and endorsement.  Employees are looking for filters for insight in a dynamic two-way flow of information, not carefully curated and endorse stale stocks of information. Employees are using the wirearchy to fix the problems with the hierarchical control of information.

Focus on Performance Instead

We are managing our employee’s attention to save time and to give them the right information with minimum effort.  Both try to improve the efficiency of their work.

What would happen if we stopped?

The answer has already been provided in organisations. We don’t actually trust that all this effort to manage attention will work. Therefore organisations created performance management programs to place individual accountability on employees to work effectively and achieve their required outcomes.

If the bottom line is performance, shouldn’t organisations invest instead in developing the elements of greater effectiveness in employee performance? Dan Pink has highlighted three elements of motivation & performance: purpose, autonomy, and mastery. We can help leaders in organisations to better lead and manage performance. We can build the capabilities of employees to more effectively use and share information in an environment of high demands on attention, through working out loud and performance management. In this environment, the goal of any work should be enabling employee choices to make work more effective and helping employees to mange the risks and issues of those choices.

Shifting the accountability of the management of information and interactions from the organisation to employees enhances both the people experience and the effectiveness of work.

The Harvard Business Review has put a lot of attention this year into collaboration overload, the challenges of collaboration and sharing of information. Can there be too much of a good thing? Always. The issue as ever is not the volume. Managing success and the return of collaboration comes down to the choices you make. Making the right choices demands a clear strategy and plan.

Reap the Whirlwind

I sell my services to work as a consultant with clients in innovation, collaboration, learning and leadership. I work for multiple clients at the same time and often work alongside other consultants, vendors and partners in this work. I have speaking engagements that can require coordination with other speakers, event organisers and more. I coach executives and sit on boards. I run conversations on multiple social media channels. On top of this I work out loud, mentor and assist others, participate in a number of communities, help manage the CAWW community and I run Working Out Loud week and other projects. I have plenty of opportunities to feel the pain of collaboration. Most weeks feel like a collaboration whirlwind.

Frustrations will always happen. Many of these pains are a part of all work:

• Am I thrilled with people who take my ideas to reuse them often without attribution? No, but I know that they aren’t helping themselves much. Often they forget it is not the work but the understanding and discussion that adds value. There is always more to be shared. In many cases, they miss out on this value and damage their own brand in their efforts.
• Am I comfortable that some people don’t realize I can help them more, form a negative impression or decide not to hire me on what I share? Those people are missing the value that comes from discussion, tailoring, and more thinking than fits in 140 characters or 800 words. Many more people will start a productive work conversation based on what I share.
• Do I need to juggle other people’s priorities with my own? Yes. However, that is frankly life. We are not islands of personal productivity. Never were. Never will be.
• Do I get frustrated with the people who don’t appreciate or acknowledge assistance? Yes, but I know I am often busy and forget to be grateful enough for the help of others.
• Do I enjoy the critics, the egotists, the argumentative, and the trolls? No. However, I am aware enough to realize that some of them are right and I will make lots of mistakes. I can learn from seeking to understand other viewpoints. I have learned not to feed the trolls. Their issues are their own.
• Do some people take more than they give in collaboration? Of course.  Much of the time this is unthinking. People can see their own needs more clearly than yours.
• Do you need to speak up for your value and the need for reciprocity? Yes. Nobody makes me give my time and effort. I have choices to make.

At the heart of issues like information overload, collaboration overload, the perils of the gig economy, and the perils of working out loud are issues of human relationships and personal agency. We can’t escape relationships and we need to own our own agency. Most importantly, we must use our frustrations as the impetus to learn and to change.

A Strategy and A Plan

Owning our personal agency in networks of relationships asks us to have a strategy and specific plans. The value of collaboration is a net value. If you look only at the costs of collaboration, you will miss all the value. The net value is realised by maximising the returns and minimising the costs.  A strategy and a plan for our collaborative activities is how we achieve this.

We can’t learn how to do better until we know what we are trying to achieve and we are measuring our performance. Some of the frustrations I described above are expected.  Many are surprises, as are many of the benefits. My goal in the work I do connecting, sharing, working out loud and helping others is to minimise the costs and continue to grow the benefits.

Here are some guidelines for your plan:

• Have a purpose: Knowing why you are sharing helps clarify the rewards that you are seeking, whether those flow back to you or are your impact on others
• Know what success looks like: When you can define success you have the better chance of achieving it.
• Know your networks: Who are your communities? What are you sharing where? Why? If you have a one size fits all strategy, you are missing out and wasting effort.
• Make choices: You cannot and should not do everything. Choose what is most valable to you and others.
• Invest only what you can: There is no valuable return on overwork. Running yourself down has only a long-term cost.  Learn to say ‘no’ when the demands are too great or the returns too thin.
• Remember the value of relationships and learning: It can be easy to forget that deeper relationships and growing skills are part of the value of collaboration. This human & social capital is just as valuable as the financial capital and may have more to do with your future success.
• Seek to match cost and value as closely in time as possible: Invest upfront for a much later return and your frustrations will escalate.  The risks will increase that things change.  Make sure you are getting returns from your collaboration now. They don’t have to be reciprocal but there should be value to you to participate.
• Ask for the value you need: People don’t know what you want unless you clearly ask for what you need. Everyone else is busy and distracted. You don’t factor in their thinking unless you make an ask.  They will assume you are OK if you keep participating silently.

We don’t have to share and give and contribute. The challenge for each of us is to make the choices to contibute and create value for us and others. 

Contribute and Create Value is the theme of this Working Out Loud week from 5-11 June 2017. 

Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one – John Berger

Work can be demanding and alienating. Isolated into performance units in a mechanical process of production the individual can feel disconnected from peers. Worse peers may be structured as competitors, if not in performance terms, as competitors for scarce resources and attention. 

As John Berger highlights in his book Confabulations the power of storytelling is to creat human moments of intimacy out of every day events. We tell stories to find the intimate humanity in our relationships and our experience. 

Working out loud involves narrating work. Working out loud takes what to us are the mundane challenges of our work and tells their stories to others. To our surprise, our mundane experience can be extraordinary to others. Our limited capabilities look magical to someone who doesn’t know how or that our everyday work is even possible. 

In a world where we are always connected, it can be hard to remember that crowds are lonely places. We can devalue human connection because we have so much of it. The value of working out loud is that its stories of work bring opportunities for new intimacy in our relationships. When we add the generosity that working out loud asks of its practitioners, then all kinds of magic are possible. 

We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet everyday total strangers, who will never say a single word to one another, can share an intimacy – John Berger

Working Out Loud week is from 5-11 June 2017. See wolweek.com for more. 

You can’t escape Relationships

Look at any diagram representing an organisation and you will see webs of human relationships. Some times these relationships are obvious. Other times the relationships are hidden in our mechanistic mindset. When an organisation describes its customers or its touch points, relationships are usually evident. Organisation charts describe relationships of roles in terms of power but they also describe boundaries and stakeholders that need to be navigated. Process flow diagrams have hidden layers of human relationships and entangling human activity that supports the lean stripped back focus on a neat process.  Equally system diagrams have hidden layers of human relationships.

Put a single human in or around your organisation and you are going to have to deal with real human relationships.  No matter what technology promises. No matter what simplicity CEOs and boards may desire.  Their roles and relationships alone bring the complexity of human relationships into the organisation. I’ve seen many CEOs bemoan the fact that “the business, the products and all the numbers have changed, but market perceptions haven’t.”  They are discounting the value of human relationships in their work.

While organisations may not treat them well, it is worthwhile to remember that no organisation exists without stakeholders. An organisation that exists for its own sake has failed already.

You have to deal with Humans

Once we acknowledge that the humans aren’t going away, we must deal with what humans and their relationships bring with them.  Every human brings motivations, knowledge, capabilities, hopes, fears, biases, experience, expectations, behaviours, trust and reputation. Every human has a network that can support them and help develop their capabilities or hinder them and distract their performance. These elements must be factored into any work.

Real humans are not fungible. They don’t move neatly when you want them to move. Humans value the personal and social capital that surrounds work, often more than the work itself. That applies to employees, but it also applies to customers, shareholders, suppliers and other community stakeholders. Any organisation ignores these fundamentals at their peril.

We are all so busy. Every day presents difficult challenges beyond our available resources. The pace and demands of our busyness mean that our work becomes too complex when a question:

• moves beyond a yes or no
• has more than two options
• requires thought
• balances multiple goals
• involves human relationships
• hangs on interdependencies; or
• does not offer an easy answer.

We are all so busy. Every day presents difficult challenges beyond our available resources. The pace and demands of our business mean that our work is always addressing the kind of question that:

• moves beyond a yes or no
• has more than two options
• requires thought
• balances multiple goals
• involves human relationships
• hangs on interdependencies; or
• does not offer an easy answer.

We are all so busy. Every day presents difficult challenges beyond our available resources. The pace and demands of our business mean we need to address the too complex questions.

We need to see others as individuals, not by comparison. The most dangerous comparison of all is comparing another to one’s self.

Humans are social creatures. We live in tribes, clans, and families. We gather in large aggregations and participate in social activities that reward us with wealth, social status, respect, and fame. For many people, the hierarchy of this social activity is an all-consuming focus.

With this social activity comes the inevitability of comparison. There are others. There is me. In the gap between the two questions arise. How do I compare to them? How do they compare to each other? Am I rising or falling? How am I doing?

The reality is that we will never know. The goals, motivations, failures, set-backs, lessons, effort, history and support of others are mostly hidden from us. We cannot know exactly how they are going or what the outward manifestations mean for their personal sense of achievement. Appearances are deceptive.

Even if there was value in comparison, we live on a planet where there are just too many other people. With all those people there are millions of ways to discriminate. There is no end to the comparisons that can be made. Know your place in one domain and another will arise to confound you.

To compare we need to see some things as like us and others as not. Ultimately, these comparisons diminish our individuality our uniqueness and our ability to contribute to the diversity of our society. As appealing as comparisons may be to our hierarchical brain, we are wiser to see each person as a unique individual.

The answer to each of the questions is not outside us.  Comparisons get us know closer to understanding what will offer us meaning, happiness and satisfaction. Comparions offer no insight into others. We can learn from others and collaborate with others. Competing with others should be saved for situations where that is the point of the game.  Competition is not the meaning of our social, human lives.