Bert Vries is one of the champions of working out loud in the Netherlands.  He is also a Social Business Management Consultant for United Mindz | Mobilizing your company’s collective intelligence   

What benefits do you see from your practices of working out loud?

Part of the benefits are in Narrating Your Work and getting Above The Flow:

• A growing network of complementary minds packed with knowledge (explicit and tacit), hands-on experience and many different perspectives
• Faster & completer learning: WOL helps me become a better social business consultant by getting more often performance feedback and from more people which creates a more truthful representation of my personal performance
• A bigger awareness in the marketplace of my point of view  about and capabilities in my field of expertise
• Focus on your goals: I am not going overboard here: #wol really helps me literally everyday to focus on my goals and achieve them easier

The other benefits come from Observable Work and being In The Flow

• More and better input for my work in progress deliverables
• More and better co-creating people for my work in progress deliverables
• More and better feedback on my work in progress deliverables
• Access to the collective brainpower of my network saves time and improves quality of work

What challenges do you have to manage in working out loud?

The big challenges you have to manage are:

• Unlearning non-WOL behaviour
• Unlearning mental models which ‘prevent’ WOL behaviour (Knowlege is power: It is not 100% only what you know but more who you know )
• Include the narrative part in the flow of my daily work,  which is iin my view the most hard part of WOL behaviour as it least focused on achieving a concrete objective.
• Controlling the potential WOL firehose of interesting people’s WOL messages

What’s the most unusual thing you’ve worked out loud on?

Working with 30+ people on more than 3 locations in multiple Work in Progress documents and seeing the deliverable grow ‘Live/on the spot” in my google docs, spreadsheets and slides

Any other advice for someone starting out or encouraging people to take up working out loud?

Find like minded people and start a WOL circle when WOL is not yet seen a critical employee skill which needs to be developed and supported by the organisation.