It is never too late to take advantage of International Working Out Loud week (7-13 November 2016).  All you need to do is start sharing your work purposefully.

The week before Working Out Loud week is always a busy one.  The most common topic of conversation is “is it too late to do something ?”  My answer is always the same “No, let’s do it.”  The theme this Wolweek is “Working and Sharing Purposefully”. That applies to how we promote working out loud during the week too.

People often want to overthink and overplan working out loud. They want to do it exactly right. They want to know they are doing it in the authorised way.  They want to know exactly what will happen when they share their work before they do so. They want to know what method of starting working out loud in their organisation will work best for their culture and community.  They want a long lead time to get ready and to convince people to get involved.

The desire for perfection is promoted by most management practices. We have come to believe we need to do one perfect thing to have success. Working out loud is different. Great working out loud is an outcome of you doing a lot of little things to build collaborative relationships around your work over time with different groups of people.  The best way to convince people is through experience and role modelling. There is no perfect predetermined answer.  There is a reason that one of the better practices, John Stepper’s Working out loud circles, is an open extended peer-support process.  You need time and help to work out how working out loud will work for you. The sooner you start the sooner you will get where you need to go.

International Working Out Loud Week has been a ‘last minute’ and ‘seat of the pants’ experience since the very first one. Great ideas arise at the last minute and they get worked on out loud as the week progresses. That’s where the interviews happen. That’s were the events, videos, blogs and other content get created. We work out loud in real time to make the event happen. If you want to start a conversation about Working out loud week today is the time, whether it is in your team, your workplace or with the global working out loud movement.

So what are you going to do today to share your work in progress in a purposeful way?