Writing

#wolweek Day 3: Generosity and Curiosity

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

International Working Put Loud Week is from 17-24 November 2014.

Generosity and curiosity are values at the heart of working out loud. These are human values we need to foster in the future of work. In times of rapid change and complex social relationships we need generosity and curiosity to build relationships, to prosper and to learn.

I woke this morning to an incredibly generous post by Jonathan Anthony, a reminder of the simple power of the generous acts of acknowledging, recognising and encouraging others. As you can tell from his blog, Jonathan is a curious man who took the chance in our meeting to ask lots of questions, to share lots of ideas and experiences and to deepen an already rich relationship.

Taking a lesson from Jonathan, I endeavoured today to be curious as to the purposes and concerns of the colleagues and stakeholders in my current project. The outcomes were powerful. By asking simple questions I identified issues that concern them that are disrupting our effectiveness as a team. Ask and be surprised what you learn.

Last night I attended a Melbourne Chamber Orchestra board meeting where we discussed philanthropy, an important topic when arts organisations are ever more dependent on private sources of funding. Two things were recommended in that presentation: stand for something and use networks. I tweeted this was great life advice too.

An important conclusion from the philanthropy discussion was that to receive support an organisation must be both generous and curious first. The organisation must show curiousity for the purposes and concerns of its community, it must build strong relationships and a reputation for effectively meeting needs. The organisation receives by giving generously to the community through the organisation’s purpose and to the philanthropists through fulfilling theirs.

Working out loud must leverage generosity and curiousity. These values move people to purpose and away from rampant self-promotion. They move working out loud from me to us. These values are the way working out loud builds trust in work relationships.

Show real interest in another. Go out of your way to help. Seek to understand their concerns and purposes deeply. Invest the time. Give first of yourself.

Enjoy the surprises and the many returns.

#wolweek Day 2: Volunteers

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

International Working Out Loud week is from 17-24 Novemember. To learn more see wolweek.com

I have a Melbourne Chamber Orchestra board meeting tonight so I will close my reflections of my experience day 2 of #wolweek a little early today. I remain blown away by the generosity of those involved in #wolweek.

Volunteers

The future of work demands volunteers. Quality knowledge work, effective leverage of personal relationships and discretionary effort are not things that can be demanded.

Working out loud is a voluntary task. Nobody had to work out loud this week. The vast majority of people won’t. People participate when they can and because they want to be involved. We have had people apologising that they can’t contribute more which speaks to their personal desire much more than our request.

International working out loud week comes together based of the voluntary efforts of people all around the world. There is no coordination and no leverage to get anything done other than a shared sense of purpose. At best there are a few polite invitations and casual conversations around people being involved in some task.  Everything is optional and yet we have people adding to the activities and adventures all the time.

Here’s an example of how we work. The founders were discussing a tweet chat as part of #wolweek. We thought it would be a great way to get everyone in one conversation. We mentioned it to people and kept discussing ways.  I suspect we were waiting for someone to volunteer to do it. As we started to think about logistics, the team who run #ESNChat let us know they are devoting their tweet chat Thursday US time at 2-3pm ET to #wolweek. They are much better at tweet chats than us and have an existing audience interested in the idea.  Perfect solution to the tweet chat dilemma. All it took was a volunteer.

We cannot and we should not make people work out loud. It won’t work and it is counterproductive. Working out loud is part of the process of work growing up. We are no longer children who speak when spoken to. We are adults who share what we want to share of our work, our challenges and our lessons.

What other tasks in your work could you move to a voluntary model?

Give

Volunteers give of their time, their effort and themselves. They do so to help others. 

What are you going to give?

#Wolweek Day 1: Lessons

Posted on by simongterry in Working out loud

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Every International Working Out Loud Week is an experiment. We have ideas. We share most of those ideas. We endeavour to engage others. However community means you never quite know what is going to happen. The day before I always wonder “What if there was a working out loud week and nobody shares?” Thankfully I don’t need to deal with the answer to that question just yet.

#wolweek is off to a great start. There’s more energy, more participants and more openness this time than ever before.

Today was a day of chatting with others, working on client work alone and of administration for me so I didn’t have the most exotic lessons from the day. However, I spent a part of the day curating #wolweek material so I had a wonderful overview of the experience.  Here’s what I learned:

Be Bolder

I am still at times timid sharer. There’s lots of “should I or shouldn’t I?”. With every experience I learn to share more. Every time I do share more I get greater value.

I am inspired by the boldness of others. The biggest reactions to people sharing today were to people who stepped well outside what they would normally share. Helen Blunden, Jodi Brown and Jeff Merrill were three examples of how to share work in a way that opens it to others to engage. Jennifer Frahm has an amazingly bold example of working out loud within a corporate context that I hope she gets to share some day.

You can always connect more

When a face to face meeting had been arranged by 9am as a result of a #wolweek post, you saw the potential of openness to connect people. We were also flooded with insightful blog posts. There were lots of comments and conversations triggered by posts that would not have happened without #wolweek. Let’s hope the rest of the week brings more people together in valuable conversation

I spent the morning with a consultant in a completely different field exchanging expertise. Jane is brilliant at helping to make accounting easier, to make it more valuable and putting her clients in control of their finances.  Her expertise to help my business and I shared a little of my expertise in exchange. I’ve saved hours of pointless work as a result.

Have fun & Be human

#wolweek wouldn’t be here but for a community of people who saw the potential and have been advocates and given their energy to the idea. We have had great support in so many places that it is unfair to not name them all. The #wolweek twitter account is an effort to recognise many.  I also have to thank the Change Agents Worldwide community for their thought leadership and enthusiasm. The common characteristic of the supporters is that they are people who have fun and value the human part of work.

To kick off #wolweek today I shared a short post in Linkedin inviting people to engage. Linkedin is rarely a place I associate with fun and human behaviours. However, the post has received an energetic response from people who want to embrace the change, the fun and a little more humanity at work.

Share

Share with me your #wolweek lessons and stories. I would really love to hear them and feature them in #wolweek. Most of all I would love to hear about the #wolweek stories that are happening away from public social sites – in offices and in private communities. Let us know what you see so that we can make #wolweek better next time.

There’s a whole week to go. What’s going to happen in your #wolweek?

Please share it.

 

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

17-24 November 2014 is International Working Out Loud Week

Work out loud. 

Let others in to the mysteries of your work. Let others find out what you know and how you do it. Let others learn from your expertise, your tips and your tricks. Let others know so that they can guide, connect, help and accelerate you.

Share your work on a post it note on your office door. Write on a whiteboard. Post a note to the enterprise social network. Give a talk. Share with the world in communities, and other social tools. However you can, share your work visibly for others to find.

Show interest in the now more visible work of others. Help others to achieve their goals. Share your networks to build theirs. Recognise their achievements and their efforts. Share your insights, advice and expertise.

Work is not a secret mystery of private talents with sudden successful outcome. Work is a long iterative and collaborative process of learning together. Working out loud facilitates better outcomes and a more effective and human process.

Work out loud. There’s an adventure ahead.

 

Collaboration is Work. Not Meetings

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

One reason many organisations are hesitant to embrace future of work collaboration practices is that they perceive collaboration as slow, cumbersome and ineffectual. What these organisations are doing is associating collaboration with the meetings that they run.

We collaborate every day. We just don’t call it that. People get together through the work day and work together. They share ideas, answer questions, solve problems together and create new innovative approaches to business.  People making things happen is collaboration.  This kind of collaboration is across a wide diversity of channels and runs from a quick hallway conversation to a design thinking workshop.

Future of work practices are about accelerating these valuable forms of collaboration. We can all do more to connect, share, solve and innovate. Collaboration like this is rapid, engaging, efficient, asynchronous and incredibly valuable. This kind of collaboration can be anywhere and happens only when needed. It makes business work better.

The erroneous perception of collaboration sounds like a bad meeting. Action must wait until we have collaborated. Our conversation will be purposeless. Accountabilities are unclear. We need to get everyone involved together, preferably in the one space. We must discuss everything and listen to everyone’s views. We will make decisions by consensus or perhaps not at all. There will be politics, confusion and much wasted time. Nothing meaningful will be learned, created or done by the process of collaboration.

That sounds like a bad meeting because it is one. Don’t frame collaboration as a meeting process.

When you want to embrace future of work practices in your organisation, don’t try to replicate your worst meetings. Multiply your best examples of people working effectively together.

Running or dancing?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We talk about how companies run. We rarely discuss how they dance.

Our machine metaphor for the organisation leads us to talk of how companies run. Running was an apt metaphor for the industrial organisation with hierarchical management, process orientation, and efficiency as its goal.

Running is domination of a single dimension, distance. Runners maximise efficiency to get the best speed over the distance for their effort. Running is ultimately an individual effort. Running together involves parallel tasks. Running is about individual performance.

The network economy demands Responsive Organisations. We are starting to challenge organisations to be more human, to be more agile, to be more innovative, to learn and ultimately to be more effective. We start to sound like we need an organisation to dance.

Dancing involves exploration of three dimensions. Dancers explore those dimensions for the beauty of the experience. Dancing is a response to changing external stimuli, particularly the movements of others and the music. Dancing is far more interactive and collaborative. Dancing is a performance for the individual and the collective.

We run machines. Humans dance.

What would be different if you asked how well your company danced?

Who says elephants can’t dance? – Lou V Gerstner Jnr

Reflection Transforms You

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

Today I was talking to a former colleague who reflected that after a year our personal approaches to work had changed dramatically and the way we see the world had changed too. My response was that if you reflect on your work that outcome is inevitable.

The process of daily reflection identifies ways to change and to improve. Lots of daily changes driven by reflective practice accumulate. In pursuit of mastery your approach to work becomes barely recognisable to where you began. Reflection transforms you step by step.

Working Out Loud Helps reflection

Harold Jarche recently made the point that working out loud isn’t much value without reflection on the value to you and to others of what you are sharing.Reflection is required for working out loud but it is also driven by the practice.

Reflection is a key driver of the benefits of working out loud. The practice of working out loud will accelerate personal learning and transformation through:

– Purpose: Working out loud helps you discover the purpose behind your work and enables you to better focus your efforts. Things that bubble up to be shared are more likely to be purposeful for you. Purpose will also be near the things we choose to do most often. Understanding why you work is a key element of any transformation
– Awareness: sharing your work sharpens awareness of what it is you do. Awareness is the beginning. As they say, knowing you have a problem is the first step.
– Sharing: framing your work to be shared can give you a new perspective too. Asking yourself what others will see and what tacit knowledge you rely on is a valuable reflection process.
– Engagement: the questions and observations of those with whine you share drive new insights and new lessons.

Work out loud and the connections and reflection will change you and your work for the better.

International Working Out Loud Week is 17-24 November. Get involved at wolweek.com.

Episode 6: Executive Engagement in Enterprise Social Networks / Work out Loud Week with Simon Terry | The Yaminade

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work, Leadership

Paul Woods and I discuss strategic value, leadership, authority, executive engagement and working out loud on the Yaminade podcast.

Episode 6: Executive Engagement in Enterprise Social Networks / Work out Loud Week with Simon Terry | The Yaminade

Dear CEO: This Enterprise Social Network Doesn’t Work For You

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Strategy, Working out loud

Dear CEO

Re: This Enterprise Social Network Doesn’t Work For You

The purpose of this note is to clarify our most recent discussion in the executive leadership team about our enterprise social network. Thanks to your help we have now clarified that the enterprise social network is the last thing we need.

However our discussion on executive engagement in the network was again challenging. Initially there was a great deal of division in the executive leadership team as to how executives should use the network and their willingness to be involved. We did not get to explore your perspective on the role of executives in using our network when you left the room for another commitment declaring ‘this enterprise social network thing doesn’t work for me’.

We must admit we were initially disappointed by the comment. However, the remaining members of the executive team spent some time considering your insightful remark. We set out below the outcomes of that discussion:

Employee Engagement will deliver our Strategy

We realised that employee engagement, leveraging new ways of working in every role and discretionary effort to achieve our strategy is what will deliver better results. We believe that building a community in our enterprise social network will be another way for our employees to connect, to share, to solve problems and to innovate. The critical question we should consider is ‘Does this new approach to work deliver value for employees?’. The views of executives are less important than the value created for this community of value creators. All the evidence to date is that the network does work for our employees. Employees are more engaged and working more effectively.

This helped us understand that this enterprise social network doesn’t work for you but it works for our employees.

Leadership Helps Create Employee Engagement

We realised that employees need help to make sense of how to use the network, need help to solve problems and make change occur. That means employees need the support of leadership in networks. Importantly, that leadership does not have to come from the most senior executives. Leadership is a role not a job. We had hoped our most senior executives would play that role to ensure that the activity in the network aligned to strategy and best realised the potential of our people. However, we are already seeing new leaders rise up to fill the gap. The senior leaders who are involved can do more to foster this.

This enterprise social network doesn’t work for you. A strong community works for leaders who will help it achieve its potential and the community will surface new leaders to help shape and foster engagement.

Attitude & Capability are a Question of Leadership

We realised that much of the discussion in the room about lack of time, doubts about effectiveness of managing in networks or lack of skill were problems of attitude or of capability. These issues can be solved because they are the kind of challenges our executive leaders solve every day in other domains when required. People learn new skills, they work in new ways to fulfil the strategy and we ask people to be more efficient and better prioritise their time to do what matters. We ask exactly the same from our employees when we want them to achieve more. We don’t accept their refusal to change.

Towards the end of that discussion an interesting question was asked ‘If engaging in the community that creates value in our organisation doesn’t work for you, why are you a leader here?’. We wanted to share this question with you. 

Conclusion: Our Enterprise Social Network Doesn’t Work For You

We didn’t see at first. We now have come to agree with you that this enterprise social network won’t work for you. 

As a result, we have started a thread in the network asking our employees to contribute to the choice of who should takeover as CEO. That conversation is currently favouring the CMO. The community value her authenticity, respect her authority and trust her leadership. We aren’t surprised that the board seems to agree. Sorry leadership of this organisation’s community did not work out for you. We wish you the best in your future endeavours. You may find some useful suggestions as to what to you can do next in the thread that has started with advice on that topic.

Thanks for contributing so much to our efforts to engage the community, realise our strategy and improve performance.

Engage an executive in your enterprise social network. A great chance for executives to get involved is International Working Out Loud Week from 17-24 November 2014. Help an executive to see the leadership potential of working out loud. Find out more at wolweek.com