The Digital Learning Journey: Advocate and Workflow

This phase answers how we use the skill and looks beyond the skill itself. Instead of looking at a skill as a set of tools and components, the framework and structure becomes more visible and apparent.

Now, we are firmly in the phase of going beyond ourselves and reaching out to others.

Phase III: Advocate

Think about cleaning your home. You need to dust, vacuum, clean the dishes, wash laundry and linens, change towels, make the bed, mop the floor, wipe down the counters and scrub the bathroom. What you do might vary based on your home, but generally what you do is the same.

But how do you clean your home?

Now that is an entirely different question. How I clean my home is different than my husband and is different than my mother. How someone does something makes it personal—and it gives us an opinion to advocate for.

Advocacy takes two forms. First, is our ability to be an advocate for others. How we can take our hard-earned skills and use those to help start the learning journey of other people. We have so much knowledge inside of us, that sharing that guide and support the confidence and early development of others, “If I can do it, so can you.”

The other side of advocacy is being an advocate for yourself. Again, you have all of this knowledge, and based on that knowledge, you are building a belief system on how the best do work, how you see things connect more seamlessly, and can better detect gaps and map them out to avoid them in the future. These beliefs are part of your value to yourself and supports your own personal advocacy.

But there is a balance.

It is important to maintain a steady presence in both sides of advocacy. Advocacy is a combination of making yourself known, available and accessible. To advocate for others, you need to have knowledge of what they do—but also have empathy for where they are in their journey and the difficulties they face. To advocate for yourself you need to have an opinion—but have a growth mindset and see that opinion as an evolving story.

We have all seen in our lives examples of individuals that fall too far in one side of advocacy or the other. Someone that doesn’t stand up for their experience and always defers to others. Someone that is touting off best practices—but has a deaf ear to those that ask for support or guidance.

In the technology world we have seen that through the shift of moving away from technology evangelism and pivot to technology advocacy: Build a network of individuals that advocate for themselves—and for others with empathy, vulnerability, and with an evolving opinion and platform.

This platform is already there when you enter this phase of the learning journey, based on all the experience you have earned up to this point. But the sophistication and depth of that platform will grow and strengthen through seeing how people perform the task and to be an advocate for others to grow, as you continue to grow yourself.

Step 7: Workflow

When we look at the process and steps we take to create, we are seeing the workflow. We can begin to look at optimization of those steps, alternative flows, and can see more about how we work versus what is done.

Pizza is one of the world’s best foods. It checks all the boxes for me with mixtures of tastes, textures, and smells. At home, my husband and I have been making pizzas for years, starting back when we lived in New York City and had some of the best cheeses and sauces around to make our pizzas taste amazing.

Since then, we have had over a decade to improve our “pizza craft.” After making pizza for so long, we learned how to prep the ingredients better, change the tools we used to bake the pizza, and even learn how to work better together in the kitchen so we weren’t stepping on each other’s toes.

We weren’t learning what to do. We were learning how to do it better.

In the past, we were concerned about getting the pizzas right. That was far less of a concern now and instead we just wanted to get more adept at making consistently good pizzas. We were establishing the order of how we did things, and the more efficient way to do it. We were establishing our workflow.

Workflow in this context refers to the order of how tasks are completed, the tools or materials that you use to complete those tasks, and to evaluate if there are improvements or optimizations that can be made to save time or make it more robust. To do this, you need to have a deep understanding of how things work. Improving workflow can lead to one massive change that improves things dramatically, or a series of smaller changes that in the aggregate, can mean significant improvements.

Improving workflow also requires a massive amount of perceptiveness and attention. There are many things that we do repeatedly, and we do them that way because we always have. But what if we did them differently? What if we questioned the status quo a bit and try something different? Sometimes getting from “A” to “Z” is faster when you break with convention.

Identifying and establishing workflow is the start of forming an opinion. The workflow that you have adopted is a platform that you can use to advocate for something better that others might not know about, and to help improve the work of others.

Workflow improvements comes from two things: The tools we use with each step, and the connective tissue that binds the steps together. Each of these are distinct entities, and there is a “why” behind each one.

Not all workflow decisions make sense on the surface. That’s because you have used your experience to navigate around potholes in a process to avoid issues or gaps in what “appears” to be the best way to do things.

Observing and optimizing workflow is the beginning of thinking less of “what” you do, and more about “how” you do things. You probably have wondered why you were taught or shown to do things in specific ways.

Now’s the time to find out why.

Or to break the rules—and find something better.

Where the values grow

Now that we are beginning to eclipse the rate of value to ourselves, we are thinking beyond ourselves. We look at how things come together and begin to recognize that, hey, we have skills that are valuable to others.

If you’re a learner…

It will be uncomfortable for some, natural for others, but now is the time to start sharing your opinions and beliefs about workflow best practices. When you do this, you will have people disagree with you, tell you that you are wrong, and tell you that they are right. This will require added resilience—but also empathy to understand their perspective and to use it as insight.

As much as you need to establish your own beliefs and best practices, you need to be hungry for learning the beliefs and best practices of others. Being inclusive of other people’s thoughts and perspectives will only strengthen your point of view and keep your beliefs mailable for when the day comes when the technology changes and you need to adapt to keep up.

And remember—workflow has a key part to the word: Work. Workflow isn’t based on optimal situations and theory. It is grounded in real work and application of skills to complete that work.

If you’re an advocate…

Everyone has something to learn; especially from those that are providing a perspective that is unrestrained from experience. I have found that many advocates forget what it was like to be a beginner or less experienced. They lose the empathy and the perspective that someone has when they are developing their skills.

Seek out these developing workflows and best practices, and partner with them to keep your own perspectives and believe fresh and nimble. Digging your heels in might sound good for standing your ground—but as an advocate you are seeking to support others and to take your perspective and add it to their own.

So, approach debate as collaborative, not defensive and help strengthen the confidence and resilience of others that are starting to share their own perspectives and insights to create a symphony of options—instead of a one-person band.

Up next

From here, we move on further beyond the how, and start to recognize categorizations of skills and how people approach their skills at a disciplinary level.

Doug Winnie is the Chief Learning Officer at MentorNations a startup focused on fostering digital skills around the globe and Director of Learning Experience and Organizational Effectiveness at H&R Block. Doug previously worked in various digital skills, education and product management roles at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Adobe. Doug is also a LinkedIn Learning author with multiple courses on digital transformation, product management, and computer science. Doug is also the editor of the LinkedIn newsletter, “Digital Mindset” that publishes weekly on LinkedIn.