Catherine Shinners (@catshinners) is a consultant and advisor helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 clients bring high impact collaboration and social business capacities to their organizations, business processes and culture to generate new value, advance workforce engagement and productivity and deepen partner and customer relationships. Catherine blogs at http://www.collaboration-incontext.com/ and her business is Merced Group.

Catherine is also a great fan of working out loud and shares her practice with us:

1.  What do you recommend for someone considering starting a practice of working out loud?
   #divein – bring forward something from your immediate work context – a little problem or process that would benefit from a little more air.
2. How do I maximise the benefits or minimise the risks of working out loud?
   Think about #wol as an act of generosity, not exposure.  People respond pretty well to authenticity and your own participation is also invitation.
3. Tell us a story of when working out loud surprised you
   A little more delight than surprise – This past year I co-wrote an article with two of my Change Agents Worldwide colleagues Joachim Stroh and Susan Scrupski.  One evening we collaborated real-time in a document, visibly co-creating content at the same time as having a social ‘conversation’ inside the document.   It was dynamic, fluid, yet focused – our work was ‘in the flow’ of collaboration.  Felt much more productive than writing something alone and sending it to others for review.  It was also a much more joyful way to work.
4. How does working out loud support your work?
   Working out loud doesn’t ‘support’ my work, it is the way I work.  When you do  ‘knowledge work’ then your work is strengthened by your ability to enlist, engage, enlarge, enliven,
5. Who inspires you to practice working out loud?
   I’m inspired by the people I’ve worked with in various organizations whom I’ve seen taken up the #wol mindset, and applied it directly to their daily work to transformative effect – working more creatively, not spending their energy stuck in knowledge backwaters, bringing better experiences to colleagues and customers.

Catherine blogs on the benefits of working out loud too: http://www.collaboration-incontext.com/2014/03/a-significant-benefit-for-users-and-organizations-who-employ-social-collaboration-solutions-such-as-enterprise-social-network.html