When I am Working Out Loud

Author's Note: Work-Out-Loud is a critical skill to be developed for the Digital Workplace of the future.

I am attempting to inquire into this through a phenomenological account - where I go into describing my feelings, perceptions and emotions as they appear in the stream of my consciousness on a regular day at work - and reflect on that experience to inquire upon the practice of Working Out Loud in general. 

The detailed account of the experience will be italicized to distinguish from the commentary that follows from the reflection on the practice. 

It was another pale day at work when my cup of filter coffee showed up. It was the sunniest thing to bloom in my work desk. Everything else seemed stuck behind the Cloud. Metaphorically and literally, of course, if you get my drift. 

With a cuppa in my hand, it was time for another caffeine shot to start my day's affairs. My browser promptly showed what I wanted. The flood gates of my Enterprise Social Network stood open. 

Notifications spilled out the beans of belonging. The rush of oxytocin flooded my anxious nerves. Yes, I belong "here" - although, I couldn't quite pinpoint what "here"  meant.  Definitely, it wasn't what I was seeing "here" - the simulacra of conversation bubbles popping in and out of working minds tethered to the fire-walled network.

I also knew for sure, "here" had little business to do with my geographical "home", where my laptop was wired with the adjoining wall separating my living room from my bedroom. Truth be told, I could never pinpoint "here" to a sense of place outside myself. It was simply an emotion to be streamed into whenever I worked out loud, far from the crowd, alone in the Cloud. 

As always, my Yammer Inbox was in a mess, with my name dragged in conversations ranging from silly, cringe-worthy jokes to philosophical conundrums. I dreaded to squander my morning dose of "sanity" upon those profound matters of trivial essence. It was time to focus.

My tasks for the week looked inviting. I had a cocky story to narrate before the C-Suite Class about the slow, yet steady "Organizational Transformation" happening in the jagged edges of my organization. I had work cut out. The various jig-saw pieces had to fall in place for the outline for the story to emerge. 

Mark Twain once advised in all earnestness,

If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.

Although I was a vegetarian, I was ready to meet the biggest frog waiting to be gobbled up that morning. Enterprise Architecture. I quickly jumped into a conversation I had initiated to understand from Experts what I didn't know that I didn't know.

I shared links upon links of perspectives which fitted my pet beliefs about those popular lenses riding high on the hype charts - Gartner's Bimodal IT, Geoffrey Moore's Systems of Record/Engagement. And in response, the terse, two-lined response I received from an expert was sufficient to confront my ignorance

Are we ready for the containers or serverless paradigms? Are we ready to move from ITIL/ITSM to DevOps?

Frankly, I had no clue what containers meant in this Cloud context, except that it branched off from the Containerization phenomenon which shook the innards of the shipping industry as we knew it. As irony would have it, my macro perspective about containers was hopelessly myopic to have a sensible conversation about it. Should I shamelessly state my ignorance of the latest cloud computing trends? Or should I rattle off some neat, regurgitated thoughts from the nearest Cloud Expert available within my six degrees of network? 

What would everyone think of me? Would they dismiss me as yet another talking head with no sound fundamental knowledge of the tectonic shifts shaping the digital workplace of the future ? 

"Work Out Loud" sounds delicious as a mantra or a philosophy to preach. And, I totally get it.

But, how does it actually work in real-life - you know, the world where we live as the sum total of our messy selves?

When every breadcrumb of our digital lives -both outside and inside the fire-wall - is toasted and grilled enough to present the best possible branded selves we could imagine to be, how could we practically work out loud?

When we are so conditioned to treat every atomic particle of work as an encoded message broadcasting: Look What I have accomplished and thought through! - how could we even begin to collaborate openly with others?

To work out loud, we need to be vulnerable, buttressed by the assurance of a safe environment where our thoughts and ideas would be solely judged upon its merit.

So, the moot question is: Are we comfortable to show in our organizations our frail selves, carrying the heavy burden of our trials, our biases, our blind-spots and more importantly our failures?

What do you think?

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If you liked this post, and feel like indulging me, you can check out these related posts on the same topic

1) 3 Ways to Kill An Enterprise Collaboration Project

2) Woody Allen & The Truth About Enterprise Collaboration

3) Reinventing Work As a Verb

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