Encourage your team to start Working Out Loud with Luffa
With laptops taking over desks and digital tools replacing the pens and paper that used to litter conference tables, lots of the work that people do these days is invisible. It happens in the Cloud, it happens in spreadsheets, it happens in our heads. And most of that is never seen by another person until we deem our product ‘Finished’. People can often feel self-conscious about their work, wanting time to perfect things before they show them to their colleagues. But this is a practice that leads to knowledge silos, slow iteration, and weak relationships between coworkers.
Watching these bad habits develop has led certain people to adopt a new workplace practice known as Working Out Loud. It encourages people to share their work while it’s being developed, from the early ideation stages to the problems encountered along the way, to its executions and the lessons learned at every phase.
And the best way to share your work? By talking about it.
“For all the productivity gains that accrue to the digitization of knowledge work, one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible…” — McGee’s Musing
At the start of a new project, there are a lot of conversations. People throw ideas around, brainstorm everything from micro to macro details and goals. Very little is often captured of these early conversations. People make the effort to collaborate and discuss every topic but there are very few tools that help teams during these early conversations. No Jira boards that capture the inspiration of a great idea or a Trello card that elaborates why certain things won’t work. Without a record, or the conversations being capture in some way, many of the ideas brought forward in these talks are likely to be lost.
These discussions are people working out loud, innovating together, which is a good first step. But if there were ways to make these discussions shareable or discoverable, their value would carry forward with the progress of the project.
This is where Luffa comes in. Capture your conversations. Share them with current or future teammates so they can understand where the project started and quickly get caught up on the work that’s been done already. Having a platform to quickly search through everything said in previous talks makes it so that the knowledge that was shared is discoverable, re-usable, letting the value it brings to the project grow over time as it’s re-used instead of having to repeat those conversations.
“Trust will work wonders, and working out loud is not a gimmick. It works when people show up and are vulnerable and courageous.” — Ayelet Baron
The more people talk and share feedback the more they trust each other and feel comfortable taking chances on their own ideas. By fostering an environment that encourages sharing, everyone will have a better understanding of the projects as well as each other and their roles within the organization.
With the advent of internal IM systems and the popularity of Slack the idea of “continuous communication” has started to take hold among teams. People no longer need to talk to each other face-to-face, conversations that start in a meeting carry over to these digital spaces. This means we have the abilities to share work consistently, but not everyone is being encouraged to.
Cultivating a culture of knowledge exchange and working out loud takes time and effort from a team. Without people consistently sharing, new employees are unlikely to see the benefits of the practice. For the idea of working out loud to take hold in your team, people need to be reminded to do it so that it becomes a habit. Once the habit has been developed people will become accustomed to presenting their early working ideas and seeking feedback before they reach a point in their work that’s hard to make changes to without restarting from scratch.
Continuous communication about everyone’s work means that everyone has a better understanding of what’s going on in the team, it means that when meetings are called there won’t be a need to spend time doing an overview of previous work. Instead, people can jump straight into more detailed conversations about problems and solutions. Making your meetings more valuable to everyone present.
Working out loud can have amazing benefits of better team cohesion and distributed knowledge. It discourages knowledge silos and encourages knowledge sharing. When teammates understand the problems being faced by their colleagues they are more likely to look for solutions and support each other, but this can’t be done without people speaking about their complications. Asking people to share their problems forces them to be vulnerable, so it’s important that ideas and issues are met with understanding.
“77% of global CEOs are concerned that a shortage of key skills could impair their growth, and say they cannot innovate using technology alone.” — PwC 20th CEO Survey, 2017
Technology isn’t going to be a source of creativity that saves a company. Technology is the tool that lets us work faster and communicate more easily. With Luffa you can increase the value of working out loud by extending its life and making it discoverable long into the future. Keeping these previous conversations and making them available to everyone creates visibility around working out loud as a practice. New employees can listen and know what to expect in the workplace so that they can quickly get a grasp on the culture that you want to encourage. Making them more comfortable to share their own ideas as well as their early work in any form.
In an age when most of our work is invisible, we need to be actively finding ways to share it and collaborate. It’s been made easier for us with the advent of technology that allows us to work with people around the world on a daily basis. Now it’s just a matter of building the habit, and there is no better way than choosing today to start capturing and sharing your own work.
