Working Out Loud: What's In It for Organizations?
Jane Bozarth
Keynote speaker, researcher in learning & worker development, focus on the real-world, practical, and applicable. Bonne vivant.
In this month's Nuts & Bolts column I explore the benefits organizations can find in encouraging employees to show their work.
There’s a lot of conversation lately about working out loud, particularly the benefits it brings to the individual worker. But selling the idea of sharing to organization leaders can be another matter. Narrating work offers myriad benefits to organizations, from better locating talent and finding tacit knowledge to increasing efficiencies to improving communication. But organizations married to more traditional knowledge management processes may have trouble seeing past those.
One of the problems with traditional approaches, for instance, 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 it may be a very different proposition with many moving parts and frequent exceptions.
Simple steps don’t tell us the story that 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. Most of us spend most of our days in overlapping conversations, email messages, meetings, and Post-It note reminders. Often what we do, how we do it, and how well we do it all depend on relationships with others. We work in fluid processes that are just not easily mapped.
The problem with documentation? Well … truth is, we aren’t very good at writing down what we do; the reality is rarely what’s documented. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have said that we end up detaching knowledge from practice, which “distort[s] or obscure[s] intricacies of that practice” (see References). And over-engineered, bureaucratized reports and documentation processes are often exercises in futility, as they capture the “what” of work but not the “how.” Narrating work, showing work, or working out loud (here are some examples) helps us capture not just what gets done but how things get done.
Want more? You can see the rest of the article at Learning Solutions Magazine.
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4 年Jane Bozarth?#workingoutloud?is an approach based on Peer Group Coaching methodology. Do you have any experience in running these programs? What is your take on Peer Coaching in corporate learning??
I enjoy meeting people and helping them through teaching, training, and public speaking.
5 年In the rest of the article you mention employee morale, and some personality types will do amazing work without broadcasting it, and what is lost includes 1) Sharing knowledge (both passing it on to future workers, AND using it to enlighten strategy/decision making), 2) Rewarding accomplishment, 3) Retention of valuable employees, 4) Unity and teamwork.?