Day 1: We think we know… open working is hard

I have decided to write a short blog or week note every day for 30 days. A daily note if you like. The aim is to get into the habit of open working, share what I am learning, what I am struggling with, and hopefully make some friends along the way (that’s you, hello new friends!) If that is the content you are interested in reading, skip my long intro about why I have decided to do this, and jump straight to the section “What did I learn today.” I share an approach I tried today to stay focussed on the big picture and the impact I want to create, while diving into the detail of a process.

I find myself thinking about open working a lot at the moment. I have co-delivered two brilliant programmes at CAST (if I do say so myself, and I do!) With my wonderful co-leads, we have supported social impact organisations taking part in our programmes to share their challenges, wireframes, and write about their experience delivering user research. We have delivered workshops on open working and re-use, facilitated discussions about the benefits and the barriers, and created online resources to break down how to write week notes, step by step. We see openly sharing work in progress as a small, but important step on the path to our broader vision, where social impact organisations collaborate to create new technology and re-use eachother’s work, saving valuable time and money. So I have been thinking a lot and two questions came up: How might we help social impact organisations learn from failure? How might we facilitate collaborate, in the open, to create sector owned technology?

It sounds exciting. And it is! But one other question that I keep mulling over is, why does the open working bit feel so tough?

Photo by Stephen Picilaidis on Unsplash

At the end of one of our programmes this summer, we asked participants what the barriers were to open working. The number one challenge was time. And while carving out the time to share work in the open can be a blocker, it isn’t the whole picture. I also know that charities can be fiercely competitive, particularly when competing for similar audiences. This creates uneasiness about sharing approaches or results that might give away a competitive advantage. It can also be unclear to individuals on our programmes what exactly they have permission to share. Who gets to make that decision? And I also hear often that working in the unknown, can feel uncomfortable and strange to write about. The innovation process is murky and messy. Who would find a blog about what you learned or what you got wrong useful anyway… (me!)

It struck me that, although I talk about open working a lot and I have found ways to practice it — speaking a conferences, setting up a community of practice, sharing with my team — I don’t write about my work. It only takes a quick scan of my medium account to see I have written 2 pieces in about 3 years.

Open working is a theme that has also surfaced in a knowledge board we are building at CAST to help us keep track of what we are learning and how it contributes to our overall mission. There are lots of great sources of evidence in the knowledge board, and one of our observations is simply this:

We think we know open working is hard.

So why is it hard? No really, why? I am curious about what is behind the barriers to open working. I want to understand that more completely, so that I can do a better job of supporting social impact organisations to work openly.

So I have decided it is time to walk a mile, or a month, in someone else’s shoes. And this is it! A 30 day experiment with open working.

What did I learn today?

Today I was getting excited about planning the Deloitte Digital Connect programme which I am co-leading with my fantastic co-lead David and the brilliant team at Deloitte. We are in the planning stage, running a couple of sprints to help us dive into who the programme is for and the impact we want to create. This week we are thinking about the application and onboarding process.

I wanted to share a quick exercise I did today to help keep me focussed on the big picture, even while diving into this detail.

The aim is to create a knowledge board about what we know, what we think we know and what we don’t know about the application phase of the programme. It is Monday morning, so I decided my brain could use a warm up. Here are the steps I took, and a little bit of context about how this exercise built on previous work we have been doing the past few weeks.

• First, I re-visited the purpose of the Deloitte Digital Connect (DDC) programme. When we started this sprint, everyone on the DDC programme planning team wrote a “headline news story” sharing what impact they would like to see at the end of the programme. This in an exercise I ran a few weeks ago where we imagined that it was July 2026, the DDC programme has come to an end, and was making breaking news. We each wrote a front cover story for an imaginary newspaper and I asked prompt questions like: What is the headline story? Who has benefited? A person of influence has been interviewed about the headline, write a quote to go alongside the news story.*

On the Front Cover template in Miro, adapted from Gamestorming

• When the workshop had ended, David had the brilliant idea to use the headline news as inspiration to create personas that we would design for. He selected central characters from the news stories, the people participating in the programme, and wrote two mini personas. Looking pack at these headlines and personas today reminded me of the needs and goals of the people we are designing the DDC programme for.
• Next, I wanted to think about the application process and eligibility criteria for the programme. What do we need to find out to ensure we design the best possible support package?
• I looked at the imaginary services that had been developed in each of the news stories. I worked backwards, what kind of brief would someone need to apply to the programme with, in order to land at the delivery of a service that made headline news? What conditions would need to be in place?

Working backwards, starting with my “Cover story” and ending with a brief

• This helped me spot a few key things. For example, I noted that each brief would need to have a clear understanding of who the users were. Each imaginary participant applied to the programme with enthusiasm to explore and understand a challenge users faced, rather than jumping straight into developing an idea for a new product or service. I also noted that I didn’t know anything about the ethnicity, gender or geographical location of the people in the news stories, was that something I needed to know in order to design an equitable programme? How should I go about finding that information out in an inclusive way during the application process?
• Some assumptions and questions started to form. I added these to a knowledge board. For example, I wrote: we think we know that participants on the DDC programme will need to demonstrate a clear user need in their application process. And then: we don’t know if the impact we create on the programme should benefit one particular user group, or multiple user groups.
• Form here I can start sense-checking the things I think I know with my co-lead and the team. And create a plan for how to find out the answers to things I don’t know.

This activity took about 1 hour in total. It is not the end of the knowledge board on eligibility and application process for the DDC, it is just the beginning. I think approaching it in this way grounded me in a higher goal, rather than getting lost in eligibility checklists, or a detailed account of all the things I do, don’t, might know, or indeed might ever want to know. If nothing else, I found it was a gentler start to Monday than tackling a blank knowledge board.

*If you want to know more about how I ran the “in the news” session I mentioned, or give it a go yourself, take a look at this exercise called Cover Story from a great book, Gamestorming. I adapted this exercise to run it as an online session using Miro — it is a good workshop to run at the start of a project with your project team or stakeholders, to help you align on the purpose or your project.

Hello! I am running a 30 day experiment in open working to help me understand the benefits and challenges, so I can get better at supporting social impact organisations to work in the open. I would love to hear your comments, ideas and feedback! Thank you, Ellen