Working out loud - mythbusting and tips

Helping people feel more comfortable working in public rather than private

What is ‘working out loud’?

Working out loud is the art of narrating, and doing, our work in public. It’s about doing what we do in a visible way to colleagues, or even people outside our organisation. It’s a generous way of working and we get back what we put in.

What are the benefits of working out loud?

Working out loud helps us make better decisions

Other people may have knowledge, experience and perspectives that could improve the quality of our decisions. We don’t know what we don’t know. Working out loud means people that we may not even know exist can see what we’re working on and offer input to help us make better decisions based on information from people closer to the action.

Working out loud helps increase engagement

As I described in this post, we can’t *make* people engaged. Engagement is an outcome. People are naturally motivated to become engaged if the conditions create sufficient opportunity for involvement and ownership. Working out loud makes it easier for people to get involved.

Working out loud helps our organisation be more adaptable

If all decisions have to go through the ‘top’ of an organisation (Senior Leadership or Managers), it can take time to receive responses and begin acting on the new information. Organisations constantly need to respond to changes - markets, competitors and internal. Working out loud means everyone, throughout the organisation, can immediately access the information and expertise they need to inform the best decision. The resulting increased transparency of how decisions are made, and on what basis, means everyone can be more trusted to work autonomously aligned to the objectives of the organisation.

Busting some myths

While helping organisations on the journey from working in private to working out loud, here are some of the myths I’ve encountered. Well I think they’re myths!

Myth: Too many people will get involved and it will slow me down

If we work out loud, then yes, it’s more likely that people will get involved if they are motivated. That’s the point, these contributors care about the organisation and want to help create the best work. By giving clarity on who determines the timeline, expectations can be set upfront, letting people know that their participation in the work is welcome, and when the decisions will be made. Working out loud is a spectrum; we can choose to sit at different places based on what we’re working on:

• Working out loud: encouraging and benefitting from input that may help us make better decisions, increase engagement, and be more adaptable. We can help build people’s trust in us by explaining why we are or are not acting on the input.
• Not working out loud: we work in private at the pace we want, but we may miss out on important information. Other people cannot become engaged in what we’re working on and may feel like we’re doing things to them rather than with them. Working in isolation, giving others no visibility could also lead to duplicated effort because people don’t know what’s being worked on.

Myth: My work isn’t relevant to others

Previous communication technologies have encouraged privacy. Emails and voice-calls are only accessible to only the people specifically invited. Social networking tools are the first communication tools that enable many people to communicate with many people. So things no longer *need* to be private because of the technology. Even though people have developed habits of privacy, we are starting to see the benefits of working publicly.

We’re starting to see a shift from private as default to public as default. So before you post something in private, think about whether the benefits of it being in private would outweigh the benefit of it being in public. For example, even if we know the one person that knows the answer to our question, if we post the question in public then other people will be able to add even more insight, and they benefit from our conversation in the future. Could this happen in email?

Myth: I don’t want to create more noise for other people

Previously in organisations, the recipient had very little control over what information was sent to them. Think about email - the ‘sender’ chooses who to send email to, and the recipient has to click through, open and read each email.

Social networking brings a shift in the way that communication flows. Messages can be posted in public, and the power is shifting to the ‘receiver’. Individuals have more choice to follow the things they find interesting rather than be inundated with what others decide for them, and we can scan through a stream of relevant messages rather than open them individually.

Myth: I’ve been hired to do this job, other people should only do their own job

For working out loud to become widespread in an organisation, the culture needs to encourage openness. This means we recognise that we don’t have all the answers, and we could benefit from the input of others to help us do even better. So if we want to work in an open way, it means encouraging people to input into any other part of the organisation, irrespective of their role.

Myth: This is nothing new

You could say this sort of thing has happened for years, in status meetings and weekly updates. Not on this scale. Social networking creates opportunities we’ve never had before.

Think back a few years ago. If you wanted to enable anyone to have visibility of and comment on what you are doing, how could you have done this? To share with many people would involve broadcasting through a newspaper, radio, television, and the power to do this was with the few rather than the many. How easy would it have been for anyone to interact with anyone else?

The Internet and social networking offer a new capability, one we’ve never had before. Anyone can be a publisher. The power is no longer with the few. Imagine what this means for the way organisations work. Similar to the ‘outside world’, communication tools in the workplace have not made it easy to share what you’re working on and get people’s input. Do ‘reply-all’ conversations in email work well with more than 20 people cc’d? Or even a conference call? What if we have a question and we don’t know who to ask, and different parts of the solution lie with different people? Is the Intranet up-to-date? Does everyone even have the ability to make updates, or are there bottlenecks with IT or Internal Communication?

Social networking offers the opportunity to do things very differently!

Tips to help us make the shift to working out loud

• Make working out loud by default: Think about what we’re currently working on. Does it really need to be private? Ask ourselves: “would the benefits of me working in public be greater than if I worked in private?”
• Be confident: People will see our work.This might feel uncomfortable at first, particularly if we’re concerned about the value we add to the organisation being exposed. Ultimately this is in the organisation’s interest, because this work is going on anyway, so it’s an opportunity to identify areas that we could improve and get coaching on it. Given the opportunity, most people seem kind and actually want to help make things better.
• Use technology: Use an internal social networking tool to do our work in a way that enables others to follow and participate.
• Encourage an open culture: But even with this new capability, will people be motivated to share? Does the organisational culture recognise and reward sharing rather than hoarding? Are people who have finally got to a senior postion after spending 20 years aquiring knowledge, going to feel comfortable giving their knowledge away to others? Changing culture can take years, though small incremental changes can that have big effects. We could begin by helping our Leaders (those that set the tone) see the benefits of working out loud, and encourage them to role model the behavior they want to inspire in others.

How would you help people feel more comfortable working out loud?