Working in the open
I used to spend hours imagining what it would be like to work on a building site. I bloody loved diggers. The colour of them, moving things about from place to place, building things, destroying things. Left to my own devices, I could craft an intricate story from whatever toys I had lying around that would generally end with moving sand from one pile into another. And I bloody loved it.
Somehow, over the course of half a lifetime of learning, I’ve lost this ability to be so playful. I feel like a bit of a eejit, taking whatever I have lying around and crafting a world to call my own. It’s been beaten out of me by assessments, testing and targets. And being grown-up. Which all turn out to be fairly useless when it comes to actually working in a modern workplace.
To be effective you need to be proactive. The modern digital worker takes ideas from around the world and adapts them to their needs. They synthesise, remix and share. I believe the ability to be effective in work is a direct function of the ability to learn. To break the world and build it back up again. To change.
But people generally aren’t so good at is explaining how their world works. It’s a private affair, one filled with tacit understanding and very personal circumstances. This can make it very hard to share and understand what makes people tick. To me, this is one of the greatest challenges we face in our increasingly complex world of work. Understanding why the hell people do what they do.
‘…one of the greatest challenges we face in our working life is understanding why the hell people do what they do’.
Increasingly I’m seeing a convergence between the skill set of a digital curator and the skill set of a great digital team member. If more people worked in the open, sharing not just the output of their thinking, but their thinking process, then life would become somewhat more simple.
Matt Thompson articulated five key reasons why Mozilla use ‘open working’ practices to get people working, and learning, together:
1. To increase participation. By working in the open, you allow others to participate in your work readily. You share in problems and solutions. You are not alone.
2. Create greater agility. Working in greater numbers brings greater speed and greater ability to get stuff done.
3. To build momentum. There is something inevitable about a group of committed individuals working towards the same goal; they cannot be easily swayed and once started, are harder to stop.
4. To test ideas early. How often do you work on something behind closed doors, only to find yourself afraid to eventually release it? What’s if it’s trash? What if people don’t like it? Well, if you’d been more open from the start, its les likely you’ll find yourself in this position. Others will have seen your work and tested your hypotheses along the way.
5. To gain leverage. Movements take followers. Followers are hard to come by if you don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.
Take this ‘open’ approach in the context of a common L&D problem; how do we improve the time-to-competency for our next generation of workers?
Well, you don’t have time to write down everything everyone knows and try and transfer it (we know that’s not how knowledge is built anyhow). Instead, you need to get the existing generation talking with the next generation on a daily basis. For that, you need participation. No one is going to do the work, then stop and try and document that on a social platform. That way madness lies.
Instead, wouldn’t it be better if everyone could just see each other’s work, as it happened? It’s not difficult, logistically or technically speaking. If people are geographically close, you put them in the same space. If not, you connect them with web-based tools. Either way, you absolutely take everything off of people’s computers and put it in the cloud.
Google Docs will do much of this for free, but there are countless other tools that can enable things like chat (Yammer, Slack, Lync), task management (Asana, Basecamp), document management (Sharepoint, Box.com, Scribd, Google Drive). The old ways of working in Word and Email are the enemy. Once its locked in Email, no one else is going to see it (CC’ing it doesn’t work).
Thompson also warns that working ‘open’ is not about public performance, endless opinion-sharing or hoping for some magical ‘crowdsourced’ solutions. Working in the open is a deliberate act, where people come together for a defined purpose. Open, somewhat ironically, takes governance.
Basically no high quality peer-to-peer learning, or working, happens by accident. It can be tempting to think that heaping responsibility back on to individuals, in the form of curation, absolves an organisation of responsibility for facilitating personal knowledge practices. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Where individuals are tasked with curating for their own working practices, then guidance should be provided as to the skill set and mindset of a working digital curator. Where teams are tasked with working in the open to further an organisational goal, then suitable structures, visions and mission should be established to enable the project to thrive.
You see, even the sandpit had rules. We had defined playtimes. If I’d been forced to sit in the sandpit 24x7, I strongly suspect my love of the digger would have died. Perhaps that explains why so many builders look miserable.
