Writing

Day 5: Celebrate Out Loud #wolweek

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Make the work of others public so that we can celebrate it.

If you take only one thing from #wolweek it should be that public praise has value. You can’t celebrate the work of others enough when that work is hidden and you are silent.

None of us make enough effort to celebrate the great work going on around us. We become used to the support, the services and the products that let us do our work.

Who makes the great coffee you drink in the morning? Do they know how much you appreciate their work? What about the security guard who knows your name and greets you with a smile?

Who are your biggest supporters at work? Are they experiencing the same silence? Are they left wondering if they are making a difference?

Who in your life enables you to work? Do you publicly recognise their contributions.

Take a minute today and everyday to thank and celebrate those who help you do the work you do.

Day 4: The vulnerability of heroes #wol #wolweek

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Yesterday, while working out loud in a community I shared how hard I found it to blog when I started. I didn’t have confidence in my ideas or my writing style. I assumed nobody was interested in what I had to say. My expertise sat mostly silent.

I also shared that my three habits of working out loud was the discipline to make me write each day. As I sat down to my first coffee, as I do now, I write my post. I publish at the end. That discipline helped me to prepare, to learn and to grow in confidence.

Describing my process was interesting to people. Far more valuable was me describing my doubts and concerns, the issues I faced and how I tackled them. That helped people close the gap between their own experience of doubt and mine. That’s far more likely to foster learning and new action. Melanie Hohertz wrote an amazing insightful & vulnerable new post inspired by that exchange.

On Linkedin, Rohan Light described my sharing of the rather difficult process to my #cmidisrupt talk as a hero’s journey. I hadn’t seen the parallels to Joseph Campbell’s work until he said it. I wasn’t trying to be heroic just sharing that good outcomes come from difficult processes. What this reminds me is that there’s a hero’s journey in all our work as we do battle with the underworld, need the help of others, pass points of no return and eventually reach our destination. Sharing that whole journey with others is what makes a work story engaging, encouraging and useful.

There is always a moment of vulnerability when we share our work. It won’t go away no matter how expert we are. Rather than pretend it is not there, wrap that vulnerability into the sharing. Make your vulnerability transparent and it moves from a hidden weakness to authenticity and a strength of your work.

The Normative Billiards called Culture

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Roll one billiard ball at another across a smooth carpet and they will collide. The outcome will be determined by Newtonian laws of motion. As a result, billiards is a game of control.

Ask a person to walk towards another across a carpet and no matter how narrow the passage they will make efforts to pass each other, wordlessly navigating the changes in course to prevent collision through glances and body language. Human interaction is a game of influence, not control.

The difference in those two scenarios is that billiard balls operate in the grip of immutable physical laws. Human being operate in line with dynamic social norms. One simple norm is that you don’t collide with another if you can avoid it. 

Whenever someone offers you recommendations based on immutable human behaviour make the social norms explicit and consider how they might interplay. When you need to change behaviour remember that changing the carefully regimented process might be less important than changing the social norms. Any organisation will be composed of the interplay of many social norms, some explicit but many deeply implicit. 

Awareness of norms will help your effectiveness in change. We are human. We are not billiard balls. 

#Wolweek Day 3 – Open to Contribution of Others

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Working out loud works best when your work is open to the contribution of others.

A short daily report, like “Long day. Too many meetings”, is a common starting point for many people’s practice of working out loud. Sharing this invites some sympathy and may draw some questions about what went wrong. However your network is left to do the work to interpret, connect and help. The fact that the day is done means opportunities to improve have been missed.

We encourage people to work out loud on unfinished work. Work that is still ongoing encourages others to help you finish. Advice & other assistance can have an immediate impact.

Bryce Williams mentioned the value of a narration in his definition of working out loud. Narration also makes it easier for others to help by supplying context. I’ve seen people respond to a report like the one above offering meeting productivity tips only to be told ‘I do that. Just a peak day on the project’. A better narration gives better context and lets others know what challenges you face without asking. Guide people to offer the help you need. If all you need is sympathy and connection, then help others understand.

Challenges you face are likely challenges for others. (We all struggle with bad meetings). Even if others can’t help they might learn from the answers you get. While sharing a short report on the day feels safer, it is much less valuable than offering a chance to contribute.

Make the way other can help and learn from you explicit in your working out loud. It is a small contribution you can make to your network and will bring about a step change in your experience. Work out loud to be open to the contributions of others.

Day 2 Silent expertise to Working out loud

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

The value of working out loud is closing the gap between our expertise and others. Working out loud makes sharing easier by making it grounded in reality and by making it more common.

Yesterday I had a phone call from a former colleague looking for an expert to help with a specific work challenge. After a discussion about the challenge and who might help, we agreed my colleague actually had the skills to do the work and would learn more by trying. That’s the benefit of one small moment of surfacing and sharing a work problem. Some times we discover we have the answer. We just can’t see it.

When we work silently we lose touch with the relevance of our work to others. We lose touch with the external benchmarks of how our skills are growing. Working in silence, we have only our thoughts for company. They are rarely useful companions. We don’t know what we don’t know. We aren’t always kind to ourselves.

Accumulation of silence also becomes a big barrier to starting to talk. We think some point needs to be spectacular to justify breaking the quiet. I know many fabulous experts who can talk passionately about their work one-to-one. Too many of them would never stand on a stage or otherwise step up to discuss their work because they think it is not special enough.

When you work out loud you increase the feedback on what you know and get clues as to what you don’t know. When you work out loud you prevent the rising expectations that come from silence. Small continuous acts of sharing connect, build trust and create shared experience of work. That makes all future sharing easier.

Reduce the silence a little. Share some work out loud.

Lessons from Presenting

Posted on by simongterry in Learning, Life & Career, Working out loud

Last week I had a long and challenging presentation to give. Here’s some lessons that I take away from that experience:

Blogging helped: all the ideas in my keynote had been explored out loud before on this blog. It is so much easier to put together a big presentation when you have ideas that you have worked up, shared and discussed with others. Where I saw gaps in the presentation, I even blogged them to make sure I had worked out what I wanted to say.

Networks helped: a fortnight out from the talk I lost confidence that what I had to say was worth saying. I asked my Change Agent Worldwide colleagues for advice. As ever they were wonderful encouraging me to speak to my passions, tell stories and be practical.

A Role Models helps:: Looking for a role model to emulate, I studied Nilofer Merchant’s TED talk. At once, I saw a way to connect quickly with the audience and to advance my presentation.

Structure helped:With days to go I had my content, but a mess of a presentation. I went back to first principles and used Barabara Minto’s pyramid principle to rebuild the presentation. I discovered my issue. I had forgotten to explicitly make & support my main point. It sounds obvious but your point can get lost in all the action & theatrics. Fixing that helped.

Practice helped: All the way along I had been practising and refining the pitch. There was one more glitch. The night before I delivered the talk I felt my stories were like a laundry list and not very practical. As I grappled with this I realised I needed to add a pattern to help the audience follow the stories. I settled on Idea>Story>So What>Extended Story. This pattern forced me to make the ‘so what’ real in another story of the same organisation. That was good discipline and helped the flow.

Preparation Helps:Because of all the changes I need not have time to commit my talk to memory. I created a bullet point list of key points, lines and transitions. This enabled me to iron out kinks and simplify again. I was very nervous when I woke but the preparation gave me confidence it couldn’t be too bad. Thankfully my nerves vanished as I began to speak.

The audience enjoyed the talk. I couldn’t have been more thrilled that the message connected and people had idea to take away and try.

#Wolweek Day 1 – Start a Working Out Loud Circle

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

Day 1 is here

The best way to have an ongoing benefit from #wolweek is to start a working out loud circle.

A wol circle is intimate, personal & private.

A wol circle provides support for your practice of working out loud.

A wol circle will help you discover your purpose.

A wol circle focused you on the contributions you can make.

A wol circle gives you a scaffold on which to build habits and learn.

A wol circle deepens your connection to others.

Gather a few friends and start working out loud.

Social Capital

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

As long as humans have existed, people have sought to disrupt society with terror. Niccolo Machivelli outlined the importance of terror in The Prince seeing it as a means to ensure social stability. Dictators, revolutionaries, terrorists and criminal organisations have resorted to terror to market themselves and project an appearance of power. They cause horrendous carnage and spread sadness with a sole objective of fracturing social capital in their opponents and strengthening their own. Their success or failure in this effort is the secret to their ability to create, grow or sustain their power.

In the essay “Striking at the heart of the state?”, Umberto Eco once pointed out that the Brigado Rossi’s pronouncements on its Italian terror campaigns revealed its lack of understanding of power in society. While you may disagreed with his view of politics, Eco rightly pointed out that ‘the system displays an incredible capacity for restabilising itself and its boundaries’ following an attack. We grieve. We unite. We rebuild. We add security rituals and we go on. These responses are all part of our efforts to unite and restore social capital following an attack. Psychological research reminds us that social capital mitigates the psychological impact of terror. There is strength in unity as more than one politician has claimed in history.

Real power is does not “grow from the barrel of a gun” as Mao remarked. The power and potential of society lies in social capital. Mao’s successors in China know this as they work feverishly to create economic prosperity. Their greatest fear seems to be loss of social stability in society. Organisations that use terror know this too. These organisations invest in social services to replace absent or unaccountable states. They invite conflict and retribution because the ongoing battle unites their supporters and disrupts social capital of other forces in their societies. No doubt they will find the violence that they seek.

At the same time we must recognise, we have better connection, capabilities and tools than ever before to connect people, to develop community relationships and to build social capital. Sustaining and growing social capital is key to our future and of our societies. Let’s not be beaten in the creation and leverage of social capital by any of the forces of violence and darkness.

Practices vs Procedures

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I have been asked by a few people who have seen the slides only whether the audience at The Change Management Institute found my talk practical. At first the question made no sense to me. How could a talk recommending four well documented practices not be practical?

Some of the issue is missing the text of the talk. You don’t get the whole story through pictures without the accompanying stories and discussion.

Then I realised the point of the question. In the presentation I talked about moving away from rigid process to adaptive learning. It would have been inconsistent with that theme to outline a 5-8 step procedure. The practices I recommended are about fostering mastery. The involve choices and learning. They are not procedures to be executed.

We are so used to the process mindset that a process is seen as the only practical option. I am very pleased the members of the Change Management Institute embraced new practices and saw the potential to learn and adapt through practice.

Learning and adaptation is the only practical way forward.