Today I get to practice a little of what I preach in the Boost Revolution — the practice of Working Out Loud In Public. I promised someone that I’d get a post up about this particular Boost practice– and even though the post is neither “finished” nor polished, here it is.
Working Out Loud is an increasingly valued way of generating and sharing what we know. It’s a common tool for knowledge management (KM) within an organization, and it can also be used by an organization to share knowledge and learning with a larger external network.
Working Out Loud, Defined
Working out loud is the practice of talking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it, so that you can analyze your actions, and improve your skills. For organizations, working out loud is any of a range of ways that people write about and display what they are doing as a way to keep track of their actions and thoughts, in a way that makes these easy to see, follow, store, analyze and share.
Working out loud asks us to capture our activities, explain and relect on what we’re doing, and then broadcast both the activities and the play by play analysis to the rest of the community. Tools for working out loud not only capture and display what’s happening, but also have spaces and tools where others can join the conversation, share feedback, and even jump in to help.
Organizations that work out loud inside their own walls benefit significantly, since they are able to see, evaluate and archive what they do — a kind of passive feedback that reinforces what they are doing or gives them a chance to adjust. When problems arise, working out loud helps us see the problems earlier, invites others to help, and provides a record for a post-mortem or after action review so that the organization can learn from the problem. For these reasons and more (which I won’t elaborate on here), working out loud is a great practice for building the organization’s capacity to do what it does.
The Boost Tweak? Working Out Loud in Public
Many Boost companies already work out loud, because they know that monitoring their own processes, streamlining their activities, accruing and also using what they know, and creating more knowledge all work to build their business and their organization’s capacity. But Boost companies go a step further. They work out loud publicly, something I call Naked Learning, and expose their actions, their rationale and their outcomes to the world. Okay, maybe not to the world, but to anyone who’s interested.
Boost Companies deliberately choose social, network tools like blogs for working out loud. That way, they create a window into their company. That means that people outside the company, like us, can look through this public window and learn along with then.
Working Out Loud publicly– across and outside the organization’s own walls — has the added value of helping other organizations get better too. “Naked learning” has an additional set of positive dynamics, mostly benefiting others but also adding to the capacity of the boost organization itself.
Working Out Loud In Public Boosts Other Businesses
Role Modeling: Watching someone else triggers learning. Simply being able to see a team at work can start an observing thinking about what’s happening and comparing what they see to what happens inside their own company.
The team or individuals who are sharing their action steps and describing their process publicly make it possible for others to mimic them. Outsiders don’t even have to understand the situation completely; if they are struggling with similar issues they can simply mimic the ways in which the Boost company is being effective, and it’s an improvement over whatever they were doing that wasn’t working.
Mimicry can be a critical step in learning, since few of us can get the movements right just by thinking about the process in the abstract. With mimicry, you try out the actions yourself, get some proof of what works, find ways to personalize it, and then get motivated to understand it more deeply. In the meantime, you may have advanced the work or created a temporary fix within your organization.
Easier Learning For Others: When people are able to see us struggle and fail, this actually boosts their ability to learn. We struggle to learn from our own failures, since our cognitive defenses lead us to duscmiis our own role in the problem.
Bonus: we get to are able to help them avoid repeating our mistake (evey parent’s fantasy) it’s likely that they’ll be able to get a little bit further along than us in their own problem solving. We can piggy back on each others’ learning. if they’re smart, they won’t simply repeat what didn’t work– they will adjust and maybe even innovate based on what we learned and shared.
Opportunity for Understanding: Working out loud, we tell the step-by-step story of what is happening. The stories we tell ourselves and others about what we do, and why, are keys ways that others come to know us. Even if we tell a story that is partial or edited, what we do share reveals what we care about and how we see things. And that reveal makes it easier for companies in our network to know us, to know how to connect with us, and know why to connect with us. They may not only undertand us better but also begic to see themselves as allied with us, enlarging the sense of community.
Being vulnerable and imperfect in public makes it easier for others to connect with you. First, Learning Naked builds trust across teh organization’s boundaries, becuase the people working together inside the organization are not only being generous, but also they are demonstrating how they deal with problems and with each other as these problems arise. Espcially when conflicts are discussed, outsiders see how they might be tr3ated if they were involved.
Second, telling your story publicly invites people to step into your shoes and empathize with you. When people empathize with your company’s situation, they are more likely to feel closer to you and to be motivated to help you.
When they reach out to help you they add to the overall amount of progress. Even better, by getting actively involved, they learn themselves.
Working Out Loud In Public Boosts The Network
Deposits in the Shared Storehouse of Learning: In a low cost way, working out loud in public adds your company’s experience to the ‘bank’ of best practices. While having your company’s case study searchable on the interwebz isn’t quite as direct as having it archived in an open wiki, anyone who searches may find it– right when they need it. The folks who benefit don’t have to be directly interested in your company or even be in your network, but the rising skill level anywhere in the network raises the quality of the game for everyone.
Quick Scaling of Solutions: Naked Learning helps best practices and right actions scale more quickly. Public sharing by the boost company means that anyone (and lots of people at once) can have quick and timely access to examples of what is or isn’t working. Often, your business is not the only one struggling with an issue — be it a software upgrade, a customer concern, or an industry jolt, other businesses in your network and community may have these same concerns. Naked learning by one company can help fixes and workarounds spread quickly to where they are needed most.
Working Out Loud In Public Builds Your Own Business
Frames The Interpretation of Your Company: Our working out loud explanations of what we are doing help outsiders interpret our intentions more accurately (or at least, more in line with how we want to be perceived). It’s easy for people outside a company to misinterpret the meaning of an organization’s actions. Putting the story out there ourselves reduces the chance that someone outside the company will misunderstand or misinterpret what we’re up to. A more accurate interpretation of our business along with a more positive, textured reputation, brings the right resources to us. Moreover, working out loud in public creates and demonstrates the organization’s brand, which may draw towards the organization like-minded potential employees, partners and opportunities.
Invites Diverse Perspectives Into Your Process: Your organization can specifically benefit from the community’s contributions to your work process. Not only might you get some help or feedback, but also you’ll get that from companies outside your own, which are more likely to have alternative or different experiences and interpretations. When we get diverse input into possible solutions, it’s more likely that our joint efforts will be more innovative.
Creates an accountability mechanism: When we put our work out for others to see, and invite their contributions, we set up some expectations of ourselves. If we ask for feedback we expect to use the feedback we’re offered. If we publicaly say we have a problem we want to fix, or a goal we want to reach, we are asking to be held accountable (even if only by ourselves). Sharing problems is a commitment mechanism that moves us towards solutions.
Creating and normalizing the experience of vulnerability: The members of our business who are tracking their work, explaining their process, and struggling with challenges, all get to use the Working Out Loud In Public process to practice the behaviors of being vulnerable and asking for help that make trust, relationships and growth possible.
Practicing How To Ask for Help: Putting learning into the public is a passive ‘ask’. It puts the company on the line as being open to help (again, good practice) and it opens a space where others can contribute if and when they want to.
Boost Companies believe that — if we make it easy to learn from each other’s experience — as a group we’ll make fewer mistakes and — we’ll all grow smarter, faster.