Nowadays everyone is adopting Working Out Loud and/or Show your work. How comes people don’t describe the same practice when they get in detail into it? How comes the more I practice, the less I recognize myself in what thought leaders describe as Working Out Loud? Did I abuse the reading of rebels like @VioletaNedkova and @stipton and became a rebel myself? I consider myself as a doer and an experimenter, not an influencer or a thought leader. In fact, the more I go, the more I wish to take again distance with those two categories of writers. I have my own thinking and my own shade of Working Out Loud. I’m not a rebel, I’m just an adult and I don’t follow anyone. I’m not a theoretician of Working Out Loud, I’m a practitioner. Since I could see that nobody is going to explain my shade of working out loud for me, I took my nicest pen to write it for you.

How did I come to my practice of Working Out Loud?

I started to share my experiments on my blog in 2014. before that time I was scared of making myself vulnerable on the web. I started with a post on the new design of UI of Kneaver https://kneaver.com/blog/prototyping-the-new-ux-design/ (which was never done). I was in a MOOC on Design Thinking and this was my first experiment of pretotyping and sharing my work to gain feedback. Jane Bozarth noticed it during her research for her book Show Your Work and included my post in her book. I became officially a precursor in #ShowYourWork :) For me, the idea was really one to makes our work visible in order to get feedback. I wrote on this aspect here. https://kneaver.com/blog/how-to-make-my-work-observable/ I used #WOL again when I designed the learning cell, an xAPI enabled analytics server, I collected feedback on best modules to use to implement a REST API server on NodeJS. it came within an hour and grab my attention toward alternatives I wouldn’t have imagined. We did 3 turns of #PKMChat on WOL last year: June 6th WOL, June 15 WOLCircles, June 21 WOL with Buffer. Each chat went a bit deeper into the concept and let us explore different views of it. WOL became a habit whenever I had a new experiment to share. I was my goal. Recently I shared my work on hash-tracking the latest #ATD2016 and the challenges I faced to make sense of what I got. This week I’m sharing my progress on setting a #PKMChat knowledge base using Kneaver. You can see my exchanges with @diigo on using their API for this purpose: Transparent, instantaneous, efficient.

Why 50 shades

It was the response, I gave last year to Jane Bozarth who was asking what I see as different in my practice between the time of her book and the time of the 3 #PKMChat. https://twitter.com/brunowinck/status/691307090334355457 I’m not going to be exhaustive but here is my take. Austin Kleon wrote a book Show Your Work. Didn’t read it but AFAIK it was mostly oriented toward creative work. Jane Bozarth wrote a book, same title I think, more oriented toward taking examples across any different occupations, giving the concept a broader application and leveraging the practice. This is where I become interested in the topic. Rather candidly, I admit, I took the concept literally. You did something? don’t be shy, show it with as little fuss as possible. https://twitter.com/brunowinck/status/594995184993206273 I came across John Stepper online and started to engage with him and read his book. https://twitter.com/brunowinck/status/594487658992271360 John Stepper introduced his vision of working out loud with a broader scope. It’s not only about one given artifact or occasion but a guide for working every day while being in connection with others. It’s a work style powered by expanding our work relationship. He lists 5 elements as being key to his shade of Working Out loud. I basically agree that all 5 are interesting attitudes and behaviors and I encourage whoever to read his work. However I differ in two ways: I don’t think those 5 elements are related to the experience I have, I don’t think it should become a movement. Personally, I’m not at ease with movements. My focus is Knowledge Transfer and I don’t see the need of a movement for that. I would have preferred that the concept stays neutral, open to all and free to change, evolve as we see it fit.

So we now have a naming issue

Should I keep using Working Out Loud, use the #WOL hashtag. It’s cultural says John, it’s branding I said. https://twitter.com/johnstepper/status/737970319324000256 I feel using #WOL causes the same ambiguity as I had using #xAPI. It leads people to think I support everything while I’m more a dissonant, questioner, and critic voice. As you will see below my view of #ShowYourWork is again different. Not using #WOL would mean that I don’t practice Working Out Loud like Helen Blunden, don’t participate to #WOLWeek (it starts today). That would also be wrong and not aligned with my interest in this field. I’m considering using a new keyword like “Talk the Work”, “Talk your Work” #TYW sounds like “Walk the Talk”. Still pondering out loud. Tons of people are sharing their work and don’t use the terms Working Out Loud or Show Your Work, they don’t even know it has a name.

What means working out loud for me

Working Out Loud is to invite others to see your work in progress. It’s a no fuss mean to convey emergent practices and share knowledge on the go. Others are not only invited to watch but to participate by commenting, suggesting or asking. While it retains an asymmetric nature working out loud is an action initiated by an individual linked but distinct from teaching, collaborating and co-creating. - Transparency. Working Out Loud is not about hiding motives. It’s not sharing some bits and retaining others as a mean to gain influence or power. Transparency is a prerequisite to Working Out Loud. Honest transparency of course. - Make your work visible. This could be challenging in some cases. For me, the major problem is that I use a multitude of windows on different computers. I could do a complete screen shot but it will then show all the windows. It will disclose conversations I have which are out of scope of the event. Also Working Out Loud could last several days, my setting would differ and the watchers would be confused by windows moving around for no good reasons. By itself, this stage corresponds to Show your Work stricto-senso. - Immediacy. Working Out Loud is about work in progress. While some delay may be required for technical contingency, it should stay small compared to the duration of the whole experience. Knowledge being shared must stay in a relative informal, unbaked form. Artifacts are not edited and let see imperfections themselves indicating how work was done. The relative unfinished status invites also watchers to suggest ideas for next steps, request to see details. Working Out Loud embeds a near real-time conversation between the creator and the viewers. It’s a social experience. - Narrate your work. Without narration, it’s a still image that one can’t understand. The narration explains us what is actually done, how to see if it will be successful, what else could have been done. The narration adds tons of details describing the mental process going on in the head of the actor. The narrator describes how thinking takes place in his mind. - Trust in the unknown. You don’t know if anyone will watch or read and if those people have intentions compatible with your. Obviously, we are very far ahead of the times we hide in garages to develop new software. Everything takes place in the open. You need to trust that people are well-intentioned and honest in their feedback. - Being open to critics. Have an open mindset. Welcoming feedbacks, allowing others to sit on your shoulder and look what you do can be a real challenge for many. Working Out Loud implies placing yourself in a vulnerable position to receive critics, some pleasant, some disturbing. Working Out Loud don’t obliges you is to justify your choices, defend your skills, respond to objections, follow every advice or conduct all the tests suggested. You can work as you normally do. Software developers have a long experience in Working Out Loud on StackOverflow. People come and share their problems, feedback starts pouring in. Not all feedbacks are kind. I’ve seen remarks like: your code is unreadable, you don’t know how to use this stuff, start with learning (formally). - Reflective thinking. The goal of Working Out Loud is to allow share practices including the “how we devised them” and the “why”. We expect feedback to go in the same direction, have been thought and encouraging a further thinking. This means that a session of Working Out Loud don’t stop when the sharing stops. There could be multiple ripples beyond. See for example last week conference at #ATD2016, some live tweeted, some discussed the backchannel and it continues. Working Out Loud is one extra tool for knowledge transfer, very immediate, lightweight, almost bi-directional, one to many. It sits in the vicinity of Communities of Practices, Social-learning, and live courses. When used inside a team or a community of practice, Working Out Loud can be seen like a solo in a free jazz performance. All instruments gradually stop, the attention is focused on one single player but occasionally one or another musician adds a note, tap the rhythm on his mike, hum a sound. They can’t refrain from accompanying and it builds tension. Musicians join back one after the other and the performance resumes. Similarly, a CoP can be a great place to debrief the working out loud episode.

What’s not in my shade

- Continuous. Working Out loud are moments in life, not a lifestyle. Like for work, devices and Internet, there is an on and off switch. So it’s occasional. I recommend trying once a month. - Too rarely. Some writers will tell you they practice Working Out Loud because they did it once, it’s not enough. Occasional must be more than rarely to become a practice. - A mean to maintain relationships with coworkers. - A magic solution to large organizations internal communication, disaffection for the ESN. In fact in my vision and my shade of Working Out Loud, it’s a tool for the future of work. For me, the Future Of Work is a time where the place of work in life and society, relations between workers and organizations will be redefined. It’s a post-Fordism evolution. For me, Working Out Loud belongs to individuals, not to organizations. It crosses naturally boundaries of organizations. I see mostly small teams, virtuals teams, teams with many freelancers leading the move. They implement fast iterations of changes in practices (lean, post-agile mindset) and need to communicate the knowledge as it is being formalized and already undergoing more changes. To take my image of the free jazz band it’s a constant improvisation (hence the “free” jazz). Working Out loud is the way to communicate a baseline on top of which others team members adjust their partition and roles. It’s a leading by example without a leader.

Benefits for the person

- Brings early feedback - Broaden the scope of alternative ways to achieve the work - Offers different perspectives on how to evaluate the work. What is good for one, could be decent for another and bad for a third one. Some could see hidden benefits. - Increases exposure. It’s more than a side benefit. Beyond feeding our ego and satisfying our need for recognition, working out loud is a great mean to attract attention, gain some respect and some authority. I have seen this at play while sharing coding experience with my peers in the software industry. - Forces to take an extra step of reflective thinking on our processes. Narrating obliges to explain details we do inconsciously. Responding to comment obliges us to challenge our beliefs and stretch our thinking further. - Could be a lot of fun and a way to engage with new people. Instant videos applications like balb, periscope or snapchat could add to the conversation although I never used them.

Constraints

- It takes time, a lot. Writing understandable English is longer than just doing it. You need to be careful that your readers or followers can understand. Making our work visible often implies resorting to artifices. The easiest one being repeated screenshots. I don’t advise to working out loud more than once a month and see what is coming. Part of the time invested in writing and sharing details is gained back by the deeper reflective thinking it causes. What is urgent and important, it’s up to you to judge. It happened several times that sharing my work caused major evolutions even without any feedback. Simply externalizing my processes helped to become self-conscious of weakness. - Confidentiality is an issue. - It can be disappointing. Depending on the topic, the time of the year you may end up spending 30% more of your time working out loud for not a single feedback and possibly no viewers at all. Yet effects can be desynchronized. Feedback can come a year later and still be valuable. - The little anxiety we all have to make ourselves vulnerable. I never had the negative feedbacks I feared. I have never been shamed for lacking knowledge or rigor, sharing posts full of typos. We expect tolerance and well-behaved people understand it. It’s a co-growth mindset both win when it works well. - It’s very hard to reuse content produced while working out loud into finalized, polished howtos. It was one of my expectations and it felt short. Consider 30% of the extra work being reusable. So basically 20% extra work goes in #WOL and can’t be reused. - Very often I share experiments, not best practices. Experiments often fail or don’t reach a conclusive outcome. It’s the goal. For this reason, most of my Working Out Loud posts have a taste of underachievement. I’m still ambivalent on this. Should I invest more time to reorganize them to be more good looking? Should I completely hide them? I learned a certain let go together with Working Out Loud. What is done is done and it’s the past. If you think that accumulation of failed experiments are a good indicator of future failure I suggest you switch off the light. - To be honest, transparent you should let others get into the back of the kitchen of your work. While you cook in your kitchen, dirty plates, wastes, errors, trials, failures are all apparent and part of the process. Take the example of the street restaurants of Temple Street in Hong Kong or in Melaka. Don’t be ashamed to show the residues of your processes.

Benefits for the others

- They can see you work as if in your shoes. How fast you execute, how often you have to try again. - They can ask questions, possibly even guide you in the experiment. They can suggest you try things they wouldn’t have tried themselves due to lack of time, knowledge or occasion. - They can lurk and get a varnish of what your work looks like. - They become aware that this is feasible and you tried it. It’s like your neighbor looking at you trying a new seed, a new plant and taking note of it for themselves for the next year. In term of KM this is the most desirable outcome. Knowledge becomes persuasive, our network becomes permeable to work in progress. - I never got a feedback from someone who learned a practice just by seeing me doing it. - I never got a feedback from someone motivated to try something, inspired by what I shared but I feel it could have happened anytime.

A few more ideas for the road

- Don’t pretend you know or master what you will share. Stay modest, open to simple advice. I admit it can be annoying to get advice on basic things like my typing, the naming of my variables but for some watchers, it’s a way to engage and enter the conversation. They taste the water with dumb, naive questions. Stay playful. - Try to plan a bit only, don’t plan too much. It must retain its fragile makeshift appearance. If it’s too prepared, scheduled to long in advance it loose spontaneity. Tolerance of watchers will be lower, expectations higher. you are now delivering a webinar, a course. it’s totally different.

What is your take on Working Out Loud?

Do you disagree? Do you have a different experience? That’s great, jump below and add your views or a link to a post with your views. Life would be boring if everyone thinks the same and there would be no creativity and no innovation. Building the practices of the future or work is a collective, iterative work. It’s a conversation. Let the conversation start, without complacency. PS: Sorry for few left over typos, sluggish Internet connection made edit a bit tedious.