#workoutloud

Personaler, vernetzt Euch!

I’ve always believed in the value of open approaches to education. Openness in education is best developed by laying bare the processes involved in the work of teaching and learning. When one has a commitment to changing education for the better, there is also the commitment to doing that work in public. The public gaze is important for two reasons, it helps uncover the assumptions that sometimes prevent us from seeing things clearly, and it encourages others to adopt new ways of looking at things.

Simon Terry encourages us to experiment with working out loud over the next  7 days of #WOLWeek. I like the definition of working out loud offered by Bryce Williams; 

Working Out Loud   =   Observable Work   +   Narrating Your Work

Where for me the observable part of my work is creating, sharing and modifying my work in place where others can contribute to it as it evolves. Narrating my work, involves not only reporting on it, and relating to it, but reasoning upon it so that it becomes fertile soil for future learning and the reconstruction of my practice.

Here are a seven simple tips to help those who want to encourage the use of working out loud in an organisation

1 Start with why

Working out loud is a change in work practices for your team. People will find it embarrassing, scary and strange. If you want change, you will need to help people to see the rationale. Explain the benefits you hope to see. Connect working out loud to your strategy. Measure and share the successes.

2 Start where your community is

If your organisation talks about work in the tearoom, don’t try to make them work out loud in a brand new technology. You will spend all your energies on the change of technology, before you get to the practices that create value. Put up a poster in the tearoom. Go where your communities currently engage and work there. If you have an enterprise social network all the better, engage its champions and heavy users.

3 Find volunteers

You promised engagement in the social network by December. If you make everyone work out loud, you will get there. Don’t. Forcing people to share defeats the generosity, the learning and the community from working out loud. It increases the chance they will try once and abandon the practice as alien. If I know you are working out loud only to meet an order, I don’t trust you more.  John Stepper starts with career talks to find volunteers for working out loud circles. Start with your volunteers and find champions. Remember you are the first volunteer and should role model the way.

4 Simple Practices

Three simple habits. Working Out Loud Circles. Huddles. Posters with questions. Post-it notes on office doors. Town Halls. Sharing photos of work. Don’t overthink it or over-specify it. Authorised use cases can get in the way of serendipity. There are lots of simple options to help people start and see the benefit.

5 Connect networks

Working out loud circles work because people enjoy the peer support as they learn new practices. How can networks in your organisation reinforce the efforts of your few initial practitioners? Make them role models in your networks to find more volunteers. Go outside the organisation and bring in people to help. The working out loud community are a generous bunch.

6 Have Fun

What’s your version of Working out loud under the stairs.  Take the stress out of the new and different by making it fun.

7 Take time

Some nice stats from our friends at Stylight:

Knowledge grows & iterates. Share the changes.

Imagine you could write a blog post that perfectly encapsulates all that you know. You would need to write it again tomorrow. In each day there are learnings and insights that shift your knowledge, experience, skills and perspectives. 

We can’t write that one perfect post. There is no point when it is immediately out of date. Besides the short attention spans of blog audiences indicate nobody but your biggest fan would read it. 

However, there is another way to share what you know. Share the changes in your knowledge, the delta. Work out loud on how your knowledge grows. Sharing this delta consistently will draw all that you know into the conversation over time. Build a new discipline. This process of sharing will accelerate your learning and iteration. You won’t have one perfect post, but over time you will build a web of interwoven posts. 

Put your ideas in circulation. Ideas don't deserve to be lonely. Share them in conversation. Watch them grow. Discover you do more.

Ideas start in conversation

We are surrounded by wonderful ideas. We have many every day. Too many are born and die lonely and unloved.

Almost all the ideas explored in this blog come from conversations. These posts are the insights and reflections on a flow of daily interactions. Many come from working out loud and the comments others make in reply to my work. 

Over time, I have learned to watch for those wonderful ideas that pop up in conversation. Teasing them out in conversation enriches them. Noting them down supplies a ready source of inspiration for future posts (Evernote is a blessing). Without others to share those conversations, there would be far fewer quality ideas.  

Ideas are better in action.

All of the ideas that become posts are further improved by being shared further, refined, tested, challenged and built upon. The really good ideas grow most through use by others.

Ideas get lonely if they have only one brain to occupy. Lonely ideas wither, lose their power and are forgotten. Sharing an idea increases its value. You still have the idea but now it has been shared elsewhere. Not only do you still have it but the process of sharing enables others to help you improve your once lonely idea.

Even better, a lonely idea shared is a call for collaboration. So many of the best projects I have been involved in arise when an idea shared becomes a common cause.

Share your lonely ideas. Connect with others to create, share and improve your ideas.

You will discover you do more by working out loud.