Work Out Loud Behaviors: Considering Downstream Impacts of Collab Decisions

Posted on February 6, 2016 by Bryce Williams

A common phrase you hear from people when trying to convince them to adopt new behaviors is WIIFM…”What’s In It for Me?”. While I’m not a fan of that mindset, personally, I understand why it’s important to help people get it. But I’ll come back to that.

I tend to lean more toward the WIIFE approach…”What’s In It for Everyone?” Unfortunately I just realized that my acronym spells “wife”…and that was totally unintentional and could get awkward depending on where I go with this. TheBrycesWife might be reading. Tread lightly…Bryce…tread lightly… 🙂

Put another way, most people ask about how to conduct their work & collaboration activities in a way that makes it as easy as possible for them…to save them time right now. But when we lead with that approach, what opportunities for future value are we sabatoging as a result? Are we making decisions that actively consider and understand the downstream impacts of how we create, share & collaborate, rather than the immediate benefits? Or do we typically favor immediate value over potential value?

Working Out Loud requires a mindset that you let go of WIIFM when you work. A mindset of actively making WIIFE decisions (there I go again) about how we are collaborating with others, and being very conscious of who “the others” could be downstream (LOST reference – 4815162342). It means that first and foremost in our work behaviors we are considering the downstream impacts of what we share, how we share, where we share and when we share…to our immediate co-workers and our overall organization and our expertise communities and to OURSELVES.

And Working Out Loud with the downstream in mind means being aware enough to make trade-off decisions right now to enable the opportunities later. I could save myself 5 minutes of effort on a task right now by choosing to do it the WIIFM way, OR, I could WIIFE it…create it and share it in a way that it has the potential to save a collective of both known and unknown people multiple hours in future. To create additional future opportunities because it was easily discoverable, reusable and shareable beyond it’s original intent.

I see these examples play out every day, both positive examples, and examples that are ripe for repairing “a lost opportunity”. I want to do a better job of sharing examples I see as real life use cases occurs, and generically share those as “teaching moments.”
First example (which prompted me to write this post) is something you see play out every single day. And you can’t blame any one person for doing it because EVERYONE does it and has done it this way for years in many places. I’m sure you’ve seen it happen in the last month as well. But there’s a better way…

WIIFM Approach: Team needs a reference about the expectations and logistics for filling out the standard project status report in the standard project tracking tool on a weekly basis. So the Project Manager sends the entire team a PPT attachment in email with those instructions, images, etc.

WIIFM Reasoning: It was quick and easy for the PM to send that email and grab the attachment off their private hard drive/storage location. Then add some names to the email. Send. Task completed. That was easy. Move on to the next thing.

WIIFM Lost Opportunities:

Each team member has to keep that file in their email for future reference, eating up email quota…or pull to their own local storage for future reference. But the PM saved 5 minutes.
If there is turnover in the team, or new projects with new project leaders that weren’t on the email, new team members won’t be able to discover or retrieve that helpful resource easily, or someone else will have to dig it out to share with them in the future…if they can remember where it was. But the PM saved 5 minutes.
If something changes in the tools & processes, the PM must sent out a new copy with the updates. More space. Now you’ve got different copies flying all over the place and recipients my end up getting the current appropriate versions confused within their own local storage tools. But the PM saved 5 minutes.
Other PMs running projects outside of your team may have the same needs to share the same info or similar info with their team, and would have no way of ever knowing that such a helpful resource exists to help their teams use the project status tracking tool. But the PM saved 5 minutes.

WIIFE Approach: PM shares the resource file in a shared folder / community that all team members have access to as part of being on the team. The PM adds a static link to the resource on the team’s main collaboration hub site to be the primary point of “locating” that file in the future. And stores it in a way that the file is discoverable through the most common search & browse interfaces the team uses on a daily basis. Then, assuming not all the team have “notifications” turned on to where this was shared, the PM sends and email to the team with a link to the new resource where it resides. (+5 minutes for PM…maybe…probably not. But this is where the “tools matter too” makes an appearance as part of the “it’s not about the tools” conversation. Another post for another day.)

WIIFE Reasoning: It took a little extra time for the PM, but the potential benefits to the team for having that as a consistent reference going forward is worth the effort…so they can focus their time on getting the work done on the projects, rather than hunting and pecking to locate the reference file again down the road.

WIIFE Reaslized Opportunities:

No need to keep the email from the PM, it saves email space, and no worries about using email as a home for any type of meaningful work content. It was just a notification to create awareness that a new resource exists in a collaboration area / folders, AND that a link has been added in that area so all team members can easily navigate to it in the future. WIIFM: Team members are appreciative to the PM for having an easy to locate resource for future reference. They reduce the “looking for stuff” distraction later.
As new members join the team or new people that weren’t on the email need to use the project status tracking tool, the link is there for continued reference and no need to bother other team members of the PM to dig it up again and send it in another email. WIIFM: PM saves time in the future from people constantly asking for a copy of the resource, and eliminating the need to locate and email again over and over because someone lost it or was not on the original email.
If something changes, you don’t have to worry about multiple copies of the older version flying around, and you don’t have to redistribute copies to everyone for them to keep locally. You just update the source where it lies, and from now forward, that some link people know and love as their place to find the reference is still the most current and helpful resources to complete the status report task in the right way. WIIFM: As a PM, I don’t have to play referee when people have outdated resources or get confused about where to find the latest information and come back to the PM for help.
Because the PM shared it in a project area that is targeted to the team but ALSO open to the entire organization, that content is discoverable via the most common organizational search engines…making it discoverable and reusable by other PMs that are using the same organizational status tracking tool…and to which those PMs can point their own teams for a good point of reference. WIIFM: The PM gets some public reputation points, from other PMs and management appreciative for the knowledge sharing and for enabling reuse and saving them time and trouble as a result. OR, other PMs may jump in with their own best practices and helpful suggestions to make the process easier for any and all using the same sets of tools and processes…helping the team of the PM that originally shared the resource.

So taking the hypothetical 5 minutes to adopt a WIIFE behavior instead of a WIIFM behavior not only considers the downstream impacts of our choices, but returns even greater overall savings throughout an organization than the originally donated 5 minutes of time.

Luckily WIIFM does eventually make an appearance…it just happens further downstream for the PM, and not just during one short moment, but in a continual and more impactful manner. By building up appreciation from others and a reputation for being helpful, making lives easier for peers, being generous, and by putting your skills and knowledge on display to emerge as a thought leader and expert on various topics…to garner more respect from your peers that see and respect how you approach your work. And you’re planting Roots!

That’s our primary challenge as WOL coaches and practitioners…to help those around us to think more about the downstream impacts of their collaboration decisions than the impact to themselves in the moment. To encourage shifts in behavior toward the WIIFE mindset with examples, stories and by suggesting effective alternatives to the predominant work mindset of WIIFM.

Shifting Out Loud #WOLWeek

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Bryce Williams

This week here on my blog started with Working Out Loud Behaviors to Develop during #WOLWeek.

Which was followed by Asking Out Loud #WOLWeek.

Next on my list of xOL behaviors…

Shifting Out Loud (SOL) = Open Leadership* + Open Innovation**

Sometimes, Working Out Loud need not be focused just on facilitating a process, a task, or a project. In fact, if that’s your only target for realizing value from the open exchange of ideas and information within your organization (which I am guessing is primarily populated by human beings), you’re missing out on an even larger opportunity.

“Shift” happens…when passionate people with new ideas, thought-provoking questions and an ability to lead from the bottom-up are provided an avenue to have their “cause” amplified more quickly and with less effort than any previously available options. Particularly when the leaders of the shift are emergent leaders as opposed to appointed leaders. Or when the “lone nut” can inspire some “fast followers” to help accelerate the significant shift.

Via Open Leadership, people have an opportunity to shift thinking and gain momentum with peers at an unprecedented rate. Sharing what inspires them, providing reasoning while work is in progress, collecting buy-in, creating awareness of the downstream impacts of their work, collecting input on how to course correct before it’s too late. Appearing more authentic vs. being always coming across as a spin-master.
Via Open Innovation, shared ideas beget other new related ideas. They prompt improvements via feedback that a single expert may miss on their new idea. Shared ideas can trigger support from corners of an organization not previously considered or reached.

This may be the most difficult of the “xOL” concepts for me to describe, because theory and promises don’t do justice to some of the stories I’ve had the pleasure of observing over the last four years. And each played out thanks in large part to one or more people combining their passion and courage with Working Out Loud in a way that led to significant shifts in an overall organization, or at least a visible and influential subset of people within that organization. Some with immediate results, some over the course of multiple years and thousands of people. And most examples originating from the bottom of the organizational structure, not the top. Unfortunately, as much as I’d love to, I am not able to share specifics about the stories. I really wish I could share more to support this concept. That’s what’s made this post so difficult to write. It’s harder to say less than to say more :).

I can only relay that the impacts are visible changes in people behavior, personal understanding, information resourcefulness, attracting masses behind a previously unstated idea/problem. And most interestingly, helping to shift an established (or previously unseen) culture on major societal issues that you’d think should be taboo in the work place, but really prove to be crucial to building a “human” community culture at work instead of a “robot” task culture in an enterprise.

When you can watch the ESN activity within such a large company “from above” over the course of 4-5 years like I’ve had the pleasure to do, you can see the shifts as they occur. You can appreciate where they started, what triggered them, and where they ended up. Unlike most, you can see the full picture behind the shift. And it’s all captured…the story having unfolded on it’s own…documented…retrievable. Open.

Do you feel like you have the methods and tools to start a movement in your org from the bottom up? How might you inspire a “shift” of what sometimes seems an immovable object by sharing more about your passions and ideas?

*Open Leadership – Credit: Charlene Li

**Open Innovation – Credit: Henry Chesbrough

Connecting Out Loud #WOLWeek

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Bryce Williams

This week here on my blog started with Working Out Loud Behaviors to Develop during #WOLWeek.

Which was followed by Asking Out Loud #WOLWeek.

And then there was Shifting Out Loud #WOLWeek.

Next on my list of xOL behaviors…

Connecting Out Loud (COL) = Bringing Whole Self To Work + Being Human at Work + Culture of Understanding

“So…Bryce…is this supposed to be a business network or a social network?”

It’s whatever the people within our company need it to be.

“So…people can only use it to talk about work, right?”

Nope, they can use it for whatever purpose they want in order to connect with other people in our company…regardless of topic…provided it is consistent with existing conduct policies.

“Won’t that distract people from doing their real job?”

Did you ever think their lives already distract them from their job, and some help, advice, relief or community support might be just what they need to get back to being productive?

My guess is if you are reading this, you’ve been part of a similar conversation.

I don’t know any better way to support this point than with some examples and stories:

Thanks to a cycling themed community, people are motivating one another to ride their bikes to work more often. They’re healthier. Community Support.
Same cycling community, a person got started to leave work one day, only to discover a flat bike tire and no way to get home. Posted their dilemma in the community with their mobile. 10 minutes later a stranger with a tire pump was standing at their bike to help them get on their way.
There’s a crowdsourced wiki page of the best places in town to have lunch. It’s part of the Foodie Network.
People help one another find good vets for their pets, good pediatricians for their children. That stuff takes time and mental capacity. Imagine the time spent calling around or surfing the internet if you didn’t have local and trusted peers to give advice based on experience?
Holiday recipes to make for the visiting families.
Understanding how to deal with certain traffic / parking pains, knowing alternate places to go thanks to how peers have done it.
Using the community to coordinate a quarterly half-marathon training program.
Advice for good gifts to get kids of certain ages for birthdays and holidays. Asking questions such as iPad or Kindle? And where to find good deals.
Raising money to help save an abandoned and and badly abused dog that is close to being put to sleep.
Using the community to spontaneously organize an organic t-shirt exchange when a large scale t-shirt distribution messed up who got what sizes.
Someone desperately wanting to find a vending machine on campus with 12oz cans instead of 20oz bottles, getting a response from a few people with ideas. But then, a facilities person with the complete list of vending machines and types provided….within the day.

I could do this all day.

These are things people usually deal with at work in some capacity, or it’s on their mind at work keeping them from being productive. Except their normal help options usually are slow and time consuming. But tools like these at work make getting advice, solutions, answers and connections WAY faster and easier than just leaving all the robots to fend for themselves at work. Clear your mind, and the work will follow.

I can’t tell you personally how many people I’ve interacted with via our communities for “social” purposes…only to find it WAY easier to begin working with them if / when the time comes up that we actually need to do real work together. Particularly for me as an introvert, having those barriers broken down somewhat helps me get to productive with those individuals way more quickly.

Not to mention that as a community manager, each of these people are getting used to the very tools you want them to use for work purposes, getting ideas how that handy functionality could be used for good instead of evil!!!! (Okay, just kidding there. Seeing if you’re still paying attention.)

But the culture of understanding element of this is important. It brings a more human and comfortable feel to the online interactions, even if those are business related conversations.

I can attest visually seeing a shift over the years of seeing people talk “at” each other via the online community, with an intent to tell people what they know…to people being better at talking “with” each other and approaching conversation with an intent of understanding others. And that culture element through the feel of our network / community transcends the personal conversations AND the business-related conversations.

Humanize your work network by letting the people be people while working. It might actually help humanize the work at little bit. Particularly in a company like mine where caring for the customer is at the heart of what we do. It helps to also care for the people you work with to set that tone.

Okay, it’s Friday. This is the least organized and most “random” or my posts on this so far, but I wanted to publish another one before I checked out for the weekend. Thanks for reading! I have one or two more in store before #wolweek is officially done on Sunday.

Thanks!

Asking Out Loud #wolweek

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Bryce Williams

During the countdown leading up to #wolweek, I wrote this post about some additional Work Out Loud behaviors to recognize and practice. Let’s dive deeper into one of them.

Asking Out Loud = Reuse Awareness + Expertise Discovery

Many moons ago as we were trying to increase adoption within our ESN, it didn’t take long for a trend to emerge. We didn’t limit what types of communities people could create. We wanted creativity and need to be easily met with a low barrier to entry, and that helped us to identify the greatest areas of opportunity in the organization where “social collaboration” could improve work outcomes.

The most common early trend was that communities were popping up for the sole purpose of collecting a critical mass of experts on a given process, practice or technology…that other people could then use as a place to post questions and get fast answers. Created as an alternative to sending email blasts, battling search engines, calling a help desk, screaming over cube walls, or desperately walking around department floors holding a sign that asks for help.

People started to realize that using these Q&A communities to ask their questions resulted in new outcomes vs. more traditional work methods:

Shotgunning the request into a community instead of targeting it to a bottleneck process usually resulted in a faster answer. It removes the problem of being stopped in your tracks by “Busy” or “Not Available” experts.
Those looking for help could keep working on other stuff while waiting for the answer to arrive because it is an asynchronous interaction. Whereas many other methods (aside from email) are synchronous and kept them from making progress on other work while they problem solved.
For the benefit of the experts, capturing what they know IN THE OPEN makes the outcome of the interaction reusable for others via search or references. And could potentially deflect future requests that come their way…so they can be more productive later! Not to mention the potential recognition and open tracking of what they’ve contributed to the organization (personal reputation management, performance management, etc).

But for this to really work, congregating experts into the proper communities wasn’t even half the battle. There’s a behavior to instill in everyone else within an organization that’s even more important to making it successful.

Asking Out Loud.

The key was teaching people to change their behaviors to recognize an opportunity for Asking for help Out Loud vs traditional hunt and seek methods. Let’s dive into the formula of key Asking Out Loud behaviors:

Reuse Awareness: The ability to identify an opportunity, when searching for something or troubleshooting a problem you are experiencing, where the answer / solution has value beyond yourself. Because it’s the people that identify this opportunity, shift their behavior from the old way, and initiate the open interactions that will lead to newly captured knowledge that make this behavior click. Where Working Out Loud as a concept recognized the sharers of knowledge, Asking Out Loud recognizes the value of the people that admit they don’t know something and make the decision to initiate their request for help in a way that will result in shared and reusable knowledge.
Expertise Discovery: There are really two parts to this. First being the skill to identify the right context and/or community to leverage for “Search Then Ask” activities. Specifically when asking a new question, understanding which online audience to target to maximize the chances of reaching engaged experts that can either answer the question or lead you to someone that can. The other is knowing how to effectively search, filter and browse existing knowledge stores of openly shared information before asking a new question which may have already been answered.

So while recognizing those that are Working Out Loud and show up as prolific sharers in your online communities, make sure to give just as much praise (if not more) to those that realize the value of asking for help through open and “social” communities. Because in many cases…if they’d never asked…the knowledge would never have been captured.

Working Out Loud Behaviors to Develop during #WOLWeek

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Bryce Williams

#wolweek

This week is going to be fun. Nov 17th through Nov 24th. People from all over the world coming together via the inter-webs to develop and practice the art of Working Out Loud…to improve their productivity…make connections…spark ideas…and further a movement. What a thrill it is to see the expansion of such a simple concept (When Will We Work Out Loud? Soon!) into the transition to a larger movement. Thanks to the likes of Jonathan Anthony, Austen Hunter and Simon Terry. You know that original post I wrote was posted on Nov 29th, 2010? So this version of #wolweek culminates within days of the four year anniversary of my first post on the topic. I’m moved myself reading some of the previews and set up for #wolweek:

As a precursor into this week’s activities, I would like to introduce some new classifications of behaviors that you may want to try and spread to others around you to help with the adoption and effectiveness of your own local #wol movement. I’ve taken the behaviors that I have observed in our own Enterprise Social Network (ESN) that drive the greatest success stories, and organized them in to “behaviors” that you can take and apply to your own application of bringing “social” and “sharing” into your work environment.

From Working Out Loud -> The xOL Light Bulb

Working Out Loud = Narrating Your Work + Observable Work

In the early days of trying to grasp the hows and the whys of this “enterprise social” thing, I focused very hard on the coaching behaviors of the individual, encouraging them to shift how they worked to make their knowledge, conclusions, activities and deliverables more open and visible to others. Change you. Dare to share. Put yourself and your knowledge out there for more people to see, consume and contribute. I can even share from my own experience this past week, as I decided to put a lot of “future considerations” I was working on (but hadn’t prioritized yet) out in the open within my own organization (via blog posts, wiki pages, video demos). Via my own fears or reservations I’d been holding what I was considering close to the vest. And the return I received from sharing was immediate:

It provided incredible ease of educating multiple people about possibilities because I’d already captured the concepts openly (shared with people that wanted to leverage what I was working on, or people I’d need to get approval from before I could proceed with the work).
It helped identify new opportunities from corners of the organization I hadn’t considered…triggering their own ideas of how to leverage what I was thinking about, at a time when I didn’t know if any interest would exist at all.
And people openly responding with new ideas on how to apply that work that I hadn’t yet considered.

And that’s all great. Those behaviors and realization of the benefits has resonated…with some. But after a certain amount of time, I began to realize that there were other key “Out Loud” behaviors emerging by knowledge workers in our network that contributed just as much if not more to the cause than what we’ve described as “Working Out Loud”. Maybe we can call them sub-behaviors of WOL. And some of those behaviors seem to be even more natural for people to pick up as they look to leverage “social” technology to get work done and connect with others. Behaviors that seem to reduce the hurdles of being a contributor to communities & networks…more than just trying to narrate work via a blog, or create observable work by storing it in open locations that generate activity streams to interested communities. Let’s boil these down into the concept of “xOL” behaviors. At least those that I’ve observed and found to be most effective to date in my own experiences.

Asking Out Loud (AOL) = Reuse Awareness + Expertise Discovery
Connecting Out Loud (COL) = Bringing Whole Self To Work + Being Human at Work + Culture of Understanding
Shifting Out Loud (SOL) = Open Leadership* + Open Innovation**
Learning Out Loud (LOL)*** = Discovery Skills(Search, Browse, Filter) x (WOL + AOL + COL + SOL + ?OL + ?OL….)

Are these acronyms going to get me into trouble? Hmmmm… In the interest of keeping everyone engaged the entire week, and not starting off with a 3,000 word manifesto, my plan during #wolweek will be to share a new post each day that further defines and explores each of the xOL concepts above with examples and descriptions of how they may help you personally and your organization. And maybe Friday we’ll save for a new xOL I haven’t identified yet that emerges from the sharing and conversation that takes place during the week. And we’ll see if, for fun, I can throw in a few related Spaceballs references as well just to keep the theme alive :). Stay tuned! I’m looking forward to being inspired while learning from all those that will be sharing and participating in #wolweek! *Open Leadership – Credit: Charlene Li **Open Innovation – Credit: Henry Chesbrough ***Learning Out Loud – Credit: Harold Jarche

Working Out Loud: The Use Cases

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Bryce Williams

I’ve decided to dig back into my roots of IT Requirements Management practices to contribute to the public conversation and understanding of the concept of Working Out Loud. For more on my personal history contributing to this idea, read here: Working Out Loud: What Happened to Then? We’re at Now, Now!

The below is a flow of an idea of something I’d like to get rolling on, with some help. Certainly not a finished product. And the target benefactor is an individual worker…or someone coaching individual workers about adopting “working out loud” work behaviors into their daily practices.

The Idea:

Capture the “behaviors” of someone that is effective at Working Out Loud into a modular use case format, organized around typical work behaviors and how each of those can be shifted to the “new way” of working instead of how most people in today’s work environment might go about that activity. And organize those use cases / behaviors / activities using John Stepper’s Five Elements of Working Out Loud.

Organize it and build it in a process similar to how I used to capture and organize IT system requirements packages.
Work Out Loud while defining Working Out Loud 🙂 So what does that really mean? A few things that will be critical to this working:

Writing a Use Case:

Each detailed use case should contain the following:

Work Activity Description
The typical / default behavior of today’s worker
The “Working Out Loud” behavior of tomorrow’s worker
Benefits of shifting the behavior
Risk Considerations / Mitigation
Real Life Stories / Examples of this “new” behavior in action. What was the outcome?

Use this definition created by John Stepper and captured on the Working Out Loud wikipedia page as a guide to brainstorming the application of the behavior to daily work activities:

“Working Out Loud is working in an open, generous, connected way so you can build a purposeful network, become more effective, and access more opportunities.”

The Use Cases:

Each use case is meant to represent a typical daily work activity.

If you have some that you think I’ve missed that you’d like added, please comment or contact me directly and I can get them added. This is a work in progress and merely a suggested starting point, including the topic groupings. As we identify and write new use cases, we can regroup and come back here and link to each individual one. Or eventually move this structure into a more wiki like structure in the not too distant future:

Making Your Work Visible (Observable Work / In The Flow)
1. Seeking an answer to a question / problem
2. Answering a question directed to you about your area of expertise
3. Answering a question directed to you unrelated to your area of expertise
4. Creating a presentation for a team / committee / department / town hall
5. Collecting team input prior to starting a work deliverable
6. Creating content for a work deliverable (WIP)
7. Collecting feedback on an in-progress work deliverable
8. Creating content for a work deliverable (Finished Product)
Making Your Work Visible (Narrating Your Work / Above The Flow)
1. Writing your objectives
2. Writing a project status update to management / customers
3. Taking meeting notes
4. Capturing brainstormed ideas about a project / process / opportunity
5. Sharing progress / status on an assigned task
Making Work Better / Creating Shared Value by Default / Leading With Generosity
1. Achieving awareness of work outside your direct responsibilities
2. Coaching people outside of your team / department
3. Discovering external resources about your role / area of expertise
4. Leading / Participating in corporate responsibility projects
5. Contributing to the Corporate Conversation (Engagement, Activities, Facilities, Corporate Policies, etc.)
Building a Social Network / Making It All Purposeful
1. Forming and collecting a community of experts on a topic
2. Connecting with fellow employees on personal interests

*Initial groupings could change or break apart. This is just a first shot at it. And we may find some use cases fit within multiple top-level categories.

I’ve spent as much time as I can spare on this this morning…but as I promised…this is a work in progress. And I was hoping to have completed at least one real use case example. But that will have to come in another day or two.

More to come! Comments for improvement welcome. And a format / structure more suitable to content crowdsourcing as well.

Working Out Loud: What Happened to Then? We’re at Now, Now!

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Bryce Williams

What Happened to Then? There’s a story about how I ended up in my enterprise role of change agent for Enterprise 2.0 / Social Business / Social Collaboration…whatever you want to call it.

For the first 10 years of my career at Lilly, I worked on various IT projects within the Regulatory department. And the role I typically performed best was known as “Business Integrator” or “Business Consultant.” And the biggest responsibility of that role for each and every project was to collect, synthesize and document the requirements of the ultimate business customers. We wrote these for four primary purposes:

To reflect back to the business representatives that you understood what they were telling you…and had captured it completely and accurately.
Requirements were the “contract” for defining how the ultimate capabilities would perform once delivered.
They were intended to be THE source for the IT implementation team to scope, design, develop and test the deliverables against business expectations. Or locate and evaluate a third-party software vendor solution to get as close to the requirements as possible.
And they were continually updated as a work in progress representation of the software development process as experimentation and iteration influenced changes to those requirements.

Over the years of doing this over and over, I developed my own art to being a “requirements manager,” particularly for fairly large IT systems, and eventually for projects that were evaluating and implementing third-party software packages. My “go to” method of organizing requirements into manageable chunks was using use cases.

To make a short story long, my methods began to draw some attention across other departments within the IT organization. People from other programs were wanting to my ideas and mentoring to replicate what we had done for their large scale IT programs. They wanted their people to learn what I was doing and how I was doing it. I was swamped.

We Just Passed Then! This was taking place in about 2007 / 2008, coinciding nicely with the time that our IT organization had just implemented a new “large scale enterprise collaboration suite.” As I explored what the new collaboration suite could do, I saw something that could help me better scale my knowledge sharing. Profiles, blogs and wiki libraries…oh my! It just clicked…

So I started blogging as I worked on projects. My thought processes, my tips and tricks, sources that I used for inspiration. I started using wiki pages to capture and get feedback on requirements instead of monolithic Word files. And occasionally instead of replying to an email request for someone, I would write a blog post and reply to that person with a link to my new blog post. And I set the security on all of that to be wide open across the entire company so others could see it and learn from it. I helped organize a “community” of business consultants that met once a month, brought in teams to share their stories and regularly presented to the members myself. But I also taught them how to follow along with and interact with my blog to keep the learning going between the meetings.

Then more and more requests for my time started coming in. New opportunities to consult for and lead larger IT-wide initiatives. Getting to present in front of the entire IT org at town halls or in senior leader committee meetings about updating our long standing software development lifecycle standards and implementing new requirements management training programs. Phone calls and e-mails and blog comments from people I’d never met asking me for help or thanking me for what I had shared. People asking me how to set up their blogs and wikis to look and operate like what I had done with mine.

I realized that there was a new way to work…and my mission was no longer to help my IT peers with requirements management. It was to be a Change Agent that would help all of my Lilly peers learn how to Work Out Loud on any topic of expertise. It had amplified my own reach and productivity, why couldn’t it do that for everyone?

When Will Then Be Now? By the middle of 2009, I had accepted a new role to take availability and adoption of our enterprise social capabilities to another level and begin teaching people all over the company the behaviors of “social collaboration”, aka Working Out Loud. And it’s about that time the practice starting becoming clearer to me and led to blog posts such as this one: When Will We Work Out Loud? Soon!

Soon! I’m writing this story because this morning I had an idea. I’m going back to my requirements management roots (use cases) to help further the understanding and practice of Work Out Loud behaviors, in concert with and to complement the amazing work that John Stepper has shared of late: The 5 Elements of Working Out Loud.

I’m going to dig deep into my old methods of requirements use case modularization and topic hierarchy to capture the key behaviors of someone that works out loud effectively, including what one would need to shift from traditional behaviors to these new behaviors. And I’m going to build it in the true nature of Working Out Loud.

We’re At Now, Now! Click here to see my next blog post putting that idea into action…and to contribute and participate if you wish!

Working Out Loud: Three Years Later

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Bryce Williams

In about one month, my first blog post about Working Out Loud will be three years old: When Will We Work Out Loud? Soon!

I’ve been thinking about adding it to the family picture.

But during recent months I’ve started to feel a bit hypocritical on the topic. Do I practice what I preach within my place of work? Yes, fairly consistently. I’m the fastest converter of an email transaction into reusable knowledge this side of the Mississippi. However, I’ve been severely lacking in the amount of sharing and engaging I do in the real open. In the public domain.

The ironic part about my relative public silence on the topic has been that the blog post (in all of its Spaceballs glory) will receive 10 times more views during 2013 than it did during all of 2011-2012 combined. But certainly not by my doing. We all have the likes of John Stepper, Luis Suarez, Dennis Pearce, Julian Stodd (among others) to thank for so eloquently enhancing, advancing and amplifying the message.

In fact, finding John’s and my blogs spotlighted in the recently released “Social Collaboration for Dummies” book by David F. Carr partly inspired today’s post. I realized that each pingback I receive and each reference I serendipitously discover gives me a sense of pride similar to what I tend to feel watching my own children achieve. It’s been fun to witness what feels like a mini-movement taking off. Just this past week alone you saw references to “working out loud” on Twitter at #jiveworld, and simultaneously at the #DevLearn conference happening across town in Vegas.

(No offense John, but the first thought that crossed my mind when I saw us referenced together in David’s book was “Social Collaboration By Dummies, for Dummies!”) :). But it’s also proof that the concept works.

Full transparency note: I received a complimentary e-copy of Social Collaboration for Dummies from David.

Can I blame my relative silence on an amazing summer of golf club tournament championships, coaching flag football, watching 3rd grade cheerleading events, helping the kids practice piano, and raising a new puppy? Well, I basically just did. But I know as well as anyone that personal discipline is really to blame. But the weather’s turning around here, so as I turn on the heat, I can more easily turn up the volume.

So how have things changed in the last three years with respect to Working Out Loud? I can think of no better way to reflect than through references to my old trusty…Spaceballs!

I’m My Own Best Friend – People are realizing that shifting what you are already doing to a style more conducive to “Working Out Loud” doesn’t just benefit their colleagues and organizations down stream, it increases the Return on Effort (ROE) they get for the time put into the exact same work. More visibility. More potential amplification and recognition for the same amount of work. My three year old blog post is an example of its very own point.
You Went Over My Helmet? – We now understand better that one of the most common roadblock associated with Working Out Loud is the fear of potential retribution for bypassing “proper channels of communication” through the enterprise hierarchy. This is an area that I think we need to continue to evolve, share real success stories to give people the tools and confidence to tackle Working Out Loud in a manner that makes them feel at least a little more “safe”…and not subject to “THAT!” What success stories do you have to share that may help people feel more comfortable in this regard?
The Bleeps, The Sweeps and The Creeps – The What? The What? And the What? We’re doing a better job of speaking a language that real business practitioners can understand. Instead of terms like “Enterprise 2.0”, “Facebook for the Enterprise” and “Social Networking,” which we used heavily in 2010, terms such as “Working Out Loud”, “Narrating Your Work” and “Higher Return on YOUR Effort” are resonating better with our business counterparts. Even my older post about Horizontal Collaboration has maintained a consistent flow of visits.
Ludicrous Speed! – I think three years ago, we were optimistic to think that by 2013 we would have achieved a much higher success rate of “light bulbs” and adoption within large enterprises. Now we are more realistic about how long such a significant shift in behavior and culture will take. We’re now more encouraged by baby steps and daily incremental progress vs. our expectations that “social” was about to “go viral” in 2010 and not getting on the train immediate was a competitive disadvantage. Susan Scrupski captured some industry sentiment on this topic back in 2012. Maybe Light Speed is good enough for now :). I know I don’t look good in plaid, personally.
1,2,3,4,5 – Security and Social. I think we’ve done a lot in the last three years to help dispel concerns around compliance and security related to “social in the enterprise”. In 2010, the main concerns I was dealing with were protecting the loss of IP, preventing people from providing “wrong answers” and inappropriate employee behavior. Now it seems there are enough success stories and examples that the conversation has shifted more to adoption and helping demonstrate the value of shifting our collaboration behaviors. We’ve demonstrated that being “social” doesn’t necessarily open up new risks, but can in fact be more successful at bringing risk to the forefront earlier and when there is still a chance to remedy the issue…in contrast to when inappropriate behaviors occurr out of pure naivete, in private channels, and aren’t discovered until it is too late to remedy…leaving only damage control to come to the rescue.

So in summary, the most concrete conclusion we can make after three years is that…everything I’ve learned about Working Out Loud…I learned from watching hours of Spaceballs in college 🙂

I’d love to hear your perspective of how things have changed in the last three years for you with respect to Working Out Loud, and what do you see coming in the next three years?

Working Out Loud Stories: It works with sensitive stuff too!

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Bryce Williams

Last year I was giving a presentation at an internal conference to a global group of emergent leaders within our company (leaders of our employee resources groups), talking about the benefits and behaviors of Social Business. As is my norm, I had the term “Work Out Loud” placed throughout the presentation to support the concepts.

I like to keep my talks interactive, so there were quite a few questions and a good amount of dialogue. Near the close as I was fielding questions, a gentleman stood up and suggested:

“I agree with what you are describing, in general. But you better stop using ‘Work Out Loud’ in this company because you will freak people out, they’ll fear compliance ramifications, and they won’t take anything you say seriously. You’re doing yourself more harm than good when you say that.”

How did I respond? Read on to find out…

Opening Up Behaviors, Not Information Security

Every piece of information has an appropriate audience. Sometimes that definition is easy to understand, other times not. Working Out Loud means maximizing the potential outcomes of the work we do by being as inclusive as possible to the widest appropriate audience. It’s not an invitation to be irresponsible.

Usually, in an act of control or a reaction from fear, we assume the appropriate audience is smaller than it really could be, likely because that boundary has not been clearly defined for us. I simply try to coach people to seek to understand the outer limits of the boundaries, to invite more value from network effects, instead of operating on an “until I’m informed by someone else that you need to know” basis.

Believe it or not I actually have an example from this week where I did some work in private with a small group of people, and consider it a win for Working Out Loud.

I was invited to contribute to some research that is somewhat sensitive, even within the company. My introduction to the effort and the work already completed? Somebody that was previously “in” on the conversation, apparently circling through about 6-8 people from different parts of the world, forwarded 12 emails to me so I’d be up to speed.

Egads! Talk about a painful example of email trees to weave through. To add to the issue, most of the participants are not people I’ve routinely worked with, nor met in person. A true example of a “swarm” team.

Being “new” to the effort I could have succumbed to the pattern already emerging. But I couldn’t bring myself to contribute to the information mess any further. I started a private wiki page and invited every person I had seen in the email trees as contributors. I summarized what I gleaned as important from the emails. I added my own brainstorming and perspectives, links to external research, and I added comments to it as my note taking method as I talked in person with my “team members.”

At first it was just me, capturing my stuff. Pulling content from emails sent by others to keep the resource current. But through conversations and metrics I could tell other people were checking it out. 3 people had bookmarked the page. But the emails were still flowing on the topic.

Finally, someone asked me via email to provide a specific framing of ideas. I did, by adding it to the wiki page and replying to his request with a link. That day I had two of the “team members” add comments to the page! Slowly but surely through my consistent behaviors I was helping the team realize the value of consolidated knowledge capture, of sharing in a place where all team members could contribute instead of creating email trees that resulted in a high number of “side conversations” on the topic.

I had “worked out loud” on a sensitive subject in an appropriate way and hopefully added value to the initiative by making the objectives, inputs and recommendations easier to retrieve for everyone involved. The ultimate value and outcome are yet to be known.

And for the sake of brevity, I won’t even get into the details of how I was able to engage a broader internal community to contribute to the research by posting a series of questions in a generalized fashion. Ultimately protecting what was sensitive, but crowdsourcing potential ideas and solutions nonetheless.

So how did I respond to the question during the presentation that day? (I am paraphrasing myself here because I likely wasn’t as succinct on my feet 🙂 )

“I appreciate the feedback. Thank you. But this is an important change for all of us, and if I keep diluting the point in order to be accepted by all, I’m not helping anyone evolve to the extent we need. For those that aren’t ready to hear it, so be it. I’m focused on helping those that are ready.”

Working Out Loud Stories: OH – Someone Working Softly

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Bryce Williams

I’ll help translate a little for those not down with the lingo: OH = Overheard.

This week I had the unique experience of overhearing an example of working softly. They were killing me softly with their example, one time…one time. (Sorry, couldn’t resist) It was a situation where understanding how to work out loud, and having an understanding of methods to utilize how others have worked out loud would have saved this person some time and some pain.

OK, here’s the situation…

I work in an open style work environment where desks are first come first served, and some days you can be working around people you’ve never met…as I was on this day. I was chugging away on my own work (hopefully not writing an email for the sake of my #socbiz street cred), when I innocently overheard a phone conversation between someone I didn’t know and our IT help desk.

Some background first. A few hundred early adopters are receiving an operating system upgrade that isn’t widespread across the company yet, and thus there are a few behaviors that are new to all of us, unique to the early adopters, and thus not widely known to the help desk yet (through no fault of their own). Our early adopters have been using a social community to share learnings, tips and troubleshoot issues with the new OS.

One specific issue that a few people came across and used the community to solve was related to viewing streaming video. I happened to come across the same problem myself earlier, so I knew of the exact thread which contained the answer, which was about a 30 second setting change.

Back to my new friend on the phone. He was reporting the same problem to a rep at the help desk, and I could hear them walking through some trial and error steps that I knew weren’t going to help. If I had known the person’s name I could have IM’d him a link to the thread. But I didn’t feel right interrupting the phone call. So I decided to wait.

Twenty minutes later, he was still on the phone, now logging a ticket that would escalate the issue to another tier of support to get back with him later. But I had to run to a meeting, so couldn’t let him know what I knew until I got back. But when I returned an hour later, he was gone and I still didn’t know his name. So unless we ran into one another again, I had lost my opportunity to help…my way.

I figured he had spent at least 30 minutes on the phone without getting his issue resolved, and who knows what he has gone through since or if he ever even found the solution? Even if it had taken him 15 minutes of his work time searching our community platform to find the answer, he would have come out ahead. A skill that investing 15 minutes to learn more about would have already paid him back in time savings.

Or, if he had posted his issue as a new question in the 700+ person community, someone aware of the already existing thread probably would have replied in less than 30 minutes with a link to the easy solution. And during that time he likely could have gone back to other tasks.

Or even better yet, imagine if I had been someone he knew better, overhearing that phone call, and if I would have had the comfort level to just jump in? Ambient awareness and word of mouth could have brought value to the situation even if the thread itself wasn’t directly used to fix the problem.

No matter how you slice it, this situation could have been helped by thinking with a “working out loud” mindset first. Or if I had the guts to interrupt the phone call…but I was taught to not interrupt people 🙂

Do you have any stories of obvious lost opportunities from people NOT working out loud?

Talk about Working Out Loud! SocBiz, Family, Sports, Golf. Out Loud.

#wolweek

From Working Out Loud -> The xOL Light Bulb