Show Your Work E-Book

Jane Bozarth

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 181

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Organizations struggle to capture tacit knowledge. Workers struggle to find answers and information across organizational databases and boundaries and silos. New comfort with social sharing, combined with the proliferation of new social tools, offer easy, useful means of sharing not just what we do but how we get things done. For the organization this supports productivity, improves performance, encourages reflective practice, speeds communication, and helps to surface challenges, bottlenecks, and that elusive tacit knowledge. For the worker it illuminates strengths, talents, struggles, and the reality of how days are spent. For the coworker or colleague it solves a problem, saves time, or builds on existing knowledge. And for management it helps to capture who does what, and how, and otherwise makes visible so much of what is presently opaque. What does showing work mean? It is an image, video, blog post, or use of another tool, or just talking to describe how you solved a problem, show how you fixed the machine, tell how you achieved the workaround, explain how you overcame objections to close the deal, drew the solution to the workflow problem, or photographed the steps you took as you learned to complete a new task. Some of the most effective examples of showing work offer someone explaining how/why they failed, and how they fixed it. Show Your Work offers dozens of examples of individuals and groups showing their work to the benefit of their organizations, their industries, and themselves. Show Your Work offers dozens of real examples of showing work, supported with tips for how to help it happen, how leaders can lead by showing their own work, and how L&D can extend its reach by showing its own work and helping others show theirs.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

Call it What you Like

Showing Your Work Isn’t New

Showing Your Work Isn’t Mystical

It’s Not Just for “Knowledge Workers”

Before Anyone Says “Yes, But...”

No One Said it All Had to Be Public

No One Said it Had to Be Instagram

Finally: Showing Your Work is Not About “Information”

Benefits to Organizations

Increased Efficiencies

Overcoming Traditional Organizational Communication Traps

Learning from Mistakes

Preserving Institutional Knowledge

Improving Public Perception and Awareness of Work and Effort

Better Customer Service

Reducing Space Between Leaders and Others

Other Benefits of Showing Work

Organizational Communication Case Study: Nasa’s Monday Notes

Benefits to Organizations?

Workers: What’s In It For You?

Establishing Credibility/Expertise

Raising Your Profile

Improving Performance

Creating Dialogue

Getting Help/Saving Time/Not Reinventing The Wheel

Getting Help: Author’s story

Getting Help: New Ways of Working and Communicating at Yammer

Replacing Résumé with Something More Meaningful

Explaining Your Thinking Helps You Learn

Teaching Others Improves Practice

Reflection Improves Practice

An Aside: Tips for Becoming More Reflective

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

Paying it Forward

Benefits to You

What Is Knowledge? and Why Do People Share It?

What is Knowledge? Three Views

But Why Would People Share What They Know?

Other Reasons?

True Story: “I Care and Want to Help”

Share is The New Save

And Finally

“This Is How I Do That.”

Topiaries

Doctors in Surgery Wearing Google Glass

Detailed Branching E-Learning Scenario

Cookies Become A Business

Making an RSA-Style Video

“This is What I Do All Day”: Médicins Sans Frontiérs/Doctors Without Borders

“This is How I Spent This Day”: Designing A Mobile APP

“This is What I Do”: The Consultant

“This is How I Decided”: Visual Design Choices

“This is How I Decided”: Yammer

“This is What I Did Today”: Attending A Conference

“This is What I Learned Today”: Attending A Webinar

“This is How I Learned That”: How I Taught Myself...

“This is Why I Learned That”: New Employee Onboarding

“This is How I Learned That”: Using New Web Tools

“This is How A Government Agency Shows its Work”: The UK Ministry of Justice Digital Services Blog

“This is How I Created That”: Matt Guyan

“This is What I Did”: Demofest

“This is What I Did”: How I Solved A Problem

“This is What I Did, and Why”: Bruno Winck and UX Design

“This is How The Collaborative Project Looks”: A Large Aluminum Manufacturer Engages in Narrating Work. Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler Offer an Example in One of Their Presentations.

“This is What I Did”: My Portfolio

“This is What I Can Do”: Résumé

“Here’s Something From My Work I Think Might Be Useful to Others”: David Byrne

“What are You Working on Right This Second?”: Snapshots of Working Days

“Showing Workflow”: 2 Approaches to Organizing A Conference

“Showing Workflow”: Storyboarding My Thesis

“Showing Workflow”: The Evolution of A Painting

“Showing Workflow”: Sketchnoting to Show ... Sketchnoting

“Showing Workflow”: Two Approaches to Planning A Book

“Showing Workflow”: Book Layout

Learning & Development

What’s L&D’s Role?

What Does Learning Look Like?

What Can L&D Do?

For Example?

For Example?

For Example?

Fill New Roles

Support Serendipity

L&D Needs to Narrate Work, Too

Lead By Example

Here’s Your Chance to Show What L&D Can Do

Showing Learning Spawns New Learning

How?

Ship It

Name Things

Platforms, Templates, Formats

How Not to Do it? Don’t Overformalize or Overengineer

Consider The Value of Making Things Public

Tools and Strategies

Video

Remember to Turn the Recorder On

Draw a Picture

Worker Concerns

Evaluating Efforts

Wenger Value-Creation Story Worksheet

Leaders Need to Show Their Work, Too

Case: The Social Coo

Be Honest: Are You Ready? What Do You Need to Do?

What Works? Lessons Learned

Some Realities

When?

Just Do It

The End

Ask The Right Questions

Index

End User License Agreement

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Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Show Your Work

THE PAYOFFS AND HOW-TO’S OF WORKING OUT LOUD

JANE BOZARTH

Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Published by Wiley

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www.wiley.com

Cover image: Shutterstock

Cover design: Faceout Studio

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“Anyone who’s diligently followed a written recipe only to have a terrible end result has felt the disconnect between tacit and explicit knowledge.”

Introduction

“Everybody works. They create documents and presentations. They schedule and attend events. They comment on other people’s work.”

∼ John Stepper, johnstepper.com

CALL IT WHAT YOU LIKE

When you were a kid, you likely had a math teacher or two who insisted that you “show your work.” It enabled him or her to see how you arrived at a final answer, what kind of thinking or steps got you there—and where you might have made a mistake. You can think of showing your work in any terms you’d like. Some call it “working out loud,” making work visible, making work discoverable, or narrating work. There are any number of approaches to showing work, from writing to talking to drawing to photographing and more. And now, with so many new, often free tools people like to use, it’s easier than ever before.

Showing Your Work Benefits Everyone

In its simplest, most obvious benefit, showing work helps an idea connect with someone else who needs it. The woman in Kansas who finds a YouTube video that helps her change the windshield wipers on her car. The man in London who, in a colleague’s blog post, finds an answer to a bedeviling question. In organizations, it makes the walls between silos more permeable, helping talent pools connect and saving workers countless hours in looking for information.

While we’re good at documenting standards, most of what we need to know is exception handling—what we must know and do and respond to that’s outside a schematic or process plan or SOP. John Hagel and John Seeley Brown assert that “as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing, and supply chain management is spent on exception handling.” (http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/09/social-software/). My own favorite neighborhood handyman, Mike, has never been here when he did not encounter an exception: the hole the builder cut for the attic stairs is not the standard size for the home repair store stairs Mike came to install; a repair to the porch railing found that the “standard” rails the builder used are no longer in stock, and on and on. Showing our work helps make what we do more visible and discoverable—particularly in the area of exception handling—and helps to record the information for future use.

The Silo Problem

“If your dots are not observable/visible/transparent, then it’s impossible to connect them.”

∼BRIAN TULLIS

The Documentation Problem

Harold Jarche has written extensively on personal knowledge management, particularly the problem with documentation: while it’s fairly easy to codify things like events and outputs, the tacit, implicit knowledge that is part and parcel of things like decisions is much harder to capture.

The attempt to reduce complexity to simplicity is fine when you’re refining the bones of a production process. It’s not fine when you assert that “leadership” is a matter of following four simple steps.

And sooner or later, documentation always breaks down. In the desire to oversimplify we end up with documents that are akin to having a map without landmarks or road signs, with the organization unable to see the routes people really take. (Brown & Duguid, 1990). We know what to do but not how it gets done. We need better maps.

Codifying Knowledge

Thanks to Harold Jarche jarche.com

SHOWING YOUR WORK ISN’T NEW

A thousand years ago a wanderer who drew a map at journey’s end might be described as someone who “showed their work.” Apprenticeship in many ways offered a “show your work” approach, with the inclusion of instruction and feedback. Electronic tools introduced in the late 20th century made showing work much easier, as many of this book’s examples will show.

SHOWING YOUR WORK ISN’T MYSTICAL

One of the problems with the literature on showing work is that much of it is just too abstract and conceptual, with complex models and illustrations with maps and loops and actors. While the models may in some ways be accurate, and often in good intentions reflect the creators’ enthusiasm, they don’t seem to be very useful, else more people would be using them. They can also be daunting to the already-busy knowledge worker and the guy who fixes copy machines who works from his car most of the day.

As with the problem of “best practices,” which are really only best in their original context, the problem with models and formulas is that they often fit common circumstances in only the most abstract way. We see a similar issue with traditional ideas of “knowledge management” (KM), offering things like manufacturing schematics that look great on paper but don’t reveal stumbling points, exceptions, or extenuating circumstances. They don’t account for what can happen due to group dynamics, overengaged process owners, and business owners who need to be educated. Likewise, asking a worker to “just write down everything you do” can get us what, but doesn’t capture how. We are seduced by the idea that activities like this give us predictability and exact science.

There’s also a danger of the formula, or the tool, driving the train. A common criticism of KM is that it attempts to isolate the actor from the work, and the work from context. Sharing work should be an organic activity in everyday workflow, not some separate overengineered process that eventually proves to be nothing but more work.

IT’S NOT JUST FOR “KNOWLEDGE WORKERS”

I have been in the workforce for more than twenty years, mostly in areas like L&D and HR. If one thing has nagged at me for all that time, it is concerns about the segment of the workforce that is, it seems, uniformly marginalized. We focus on the “knowledge worker,” typically viewed as a college graduate working in a white collar job, at a desk, maybe at a desk in a cubicle, maybe at a desk in a home office. It’s fine to want to know what they know, but what about the rest of the workforce? As noted by Mike Rowe (http://profoundlydisconnected.com/), “No one ever stops to talk to the guys working on the film crew.”

You appreciate the hands-on or technical worker when you’ve tried a home repair a bit beyond your abilities, or despite following all directions failed at gardening. Anyone who’s diligently followed a written recipe only to have a terrible end result has felt the disconnect between tacit and explicit knowledge.

Here’s an example. Ask an expert to write down her recipe for caramel apples and this is what you’ll get:

Caramel Apples

6 apples14-oz package of caramels, unwrapped2 Tablespoons milk

Remove stems from apple; push a craft stick into the top. Butter a baking sheet.

Place caramels and milk in a microwave safe bowl. Microwave 2 minutes, stirring once. Allow to cool briefly.

Roll each apple quickly in caramel sauce until well coated. Place on prepared sheet to set.

Here’s what happens when you ask an expert to show her work. This Snapguide on making caramel apples, from Bridget Burge’s Bridget’s Everyday Cooking (http://snapguide.com/guides/make-caramel-apples-1/) includes some things a novice might not know, and an expert might not think to write down:

Embracing a “Show Your Work” approach helps to include that segment of the workforce that’s so often been marginalized. Also: we can get a better understanding of what the tradesperson or the craftsperson does. How did the groundskeeper create that elephant topiary in front of the children’s wing at the local hospital? How did the pastry chef uniformly brown 400 Baked Alaskas to be served simultaneously? It’s important, for clear communication, to strip out extraneous information. But sometimes we strip out too much, and the bones we’re left with aren’t enough. As Brown and Duguid (1991) noted, taking out too much information about the daily reality of the work can leave you holding a map with no landmarks.

BEFORE ANYONE SAYS “YES, BUT...”

NO ONE SAID IT ALL HAD TO BE PUBLIC

As we’ll see in the examples, everything doesn’t need to be shared everywhere. Proprietary information about a particular client may need to stay within a single work group. Details on fixing a particular water heater might be appropriate only for the company repair people scattered across North America. We don’t want people to be deluged with information that is truly relevant only to a few. The problem is, often those making that call don’t know who else might benefit. I once got a big work problem solved by a Twitter connection who teaches in China. And another by a consultant who specializes in helping retail and restaurant clients make their environments more comfortable for those with Asperger’s and autism. One of the challenges is to figure out where to best share work for maximum benefit to everyone.

NO ONE SAID IT HAD TO BE INSTAGRAM

It seems as soon as people start talking tools there is quickly a hue and cry against Facebook, or LinkedIn, or YouTube. While I see a lot of overcaution (Really? Your dress code and wellness program are secret? Can’t have cameras inside the workplace? Not even if it’s for a limited, “I need to photograph this cake” use? Ok, not even then? How about drawing? Have they banned drawing, too?) I agree that there need to be guidelines for where to share what. Here’s one approach:

Image courtesy Joachim Stroh

FINALLY: SHOWING YOUR WORK IS NOT ABOUT “INFORMATION”

The quest for “information” generates:

Spreadsheets

Meetings

Quotas

TPS reports

Status updates

Top-down dissemination

Sacred story versus real story

Only good news

“Information” alone is not enough. Adding the better information to more understanding of the exception, the behavior of the individual, the input of the expert, the workaround, the correction, the error helps generate a more robust picture that will help to inform and further refine enacting skillful work.

Remember: Communication over information. Conversation over tools.

So: Let’s get going.

Knowing what gets done is not the same as knowing how it gets done.

Benefits to Organizations

Narrating work offers myriad benefits to organizations, from better locating talent and finding tacit knowledge to increasing efficiencies to improving communication. One of the problems with traditional knowledge management is the temptation to try and oversimplify an unavoidably complex task. Building a house takes much more than a blueprint; a schematic of a manufacturing process may, from 50,000 feet, look like a series of simple steps but on the shop floor be a very different proposition with many moving parts and frequent exceptions.

“If everyone in the team narrated their work openly, we wouldn’t need any meetings to assess project status and we would gain a lot of time.”

∼JEROEN SANGERS, http://en.blog.zyncro.com/2013/05/16/working-out-loud/

But they don’t tell us the story the person in charge of the process, on the floor, every day, would tell: what to do when a supplier fails to ship a critical component, or a flu epidemic derails schedules, or someone creates a custom shim for an ill-fitting part without telling anyone about the flaw. The problem with documentation? Well . . . the reality is rarely what’s documented. So how can showing work help the organization?

INCREASED EFFICIENCIES

Reduction in meetings

Fewer silos and decrease in redundancy

Saved time and energy

Reduction of time spent both in searching for information and people/relationships

Reduction in time spent interpreting historical documents and artifacts

Connecting talent pools

Improvement in creating and storing information and artifacts

Capturing explicit, but not tacit, knowledge

(Author note: This does not address the problem of meetings held from dysfunction, like creating intentional delays, discomfort with using newer, more efficient tools, simply liking to “get together” even when it is not productive, and having meetings to give the appearance of working. In other words: sometimes managers don’t want to reduce meetings. Interestingly, I have worked in two organizations fueled by “standing meetings,” in which allotted time gets filled whether there is anything important to discuss or not. I worked in a third in which there were no standing meetings, and it seemed to get by just fine without them.)