Welcome to WOLWeek

Welcome to International Working Out Loud Week 18-24 November 2019.  WOLWeek is a celebration of the practice of working out loud (& related practices) and a chance for the global community to advocate for increased openness of work.  This is the seventh year of WOLWeek and it continues to grow along with the global WOL community.

For those new to WOLWeek, working out loud is the practice of sharing work in progress with a relevant community to foster learning and collaboration.

The Benefits of Connection

This International Working Out Loud Week we will be exploring the theme of “Sharing the Benefits of Working Out Loud”. The first benefit we will explore is greater connection.

In modern lives we know more than ever. We can get more done than ever before in history. We move figuratively and literally at a pace with an ever-changing array of demands. In all this activity and all these pressures, we can lose our connection to the others we need to live and prosper.

Human connection is the foundation for happiness success in modern workplace and in modern lives. Nobody is an island. We need information, support and collaboration of others in every activity of the day. Machines may be increasingly automating the routine, but it leaves our lives more demanding as we grapple with the new, the changing, the creative, the complex and the exceptions. These challenges demand of us the best of our human talents and our human networks.

Do you really know the others with whom you work? Do you know their goals, their dreams, the breadth of their capabilities, their weaknesses and all the many things that they know or do minute to minute? Far too many of our interactions are transactional engagements on the surface of our relationships focused solely on the exhanges necessary to complete a task. We know the other task doers and we may know some of their tasks, but do we truly connect with others human-to-human.

Working out loud makes work findable. Working out loud makes people, their capabilities, information and goals knowable. A key benefit of working out loud is providing a deeper context for the daily interactions of our working lives. Every relationship exists in context and is richer for the depth of the shared context.

A challenge for today

Share one piece of your work in progress with another person. Ask them what they have going on. Explore the potential of building a richer context in your relationship.

A Reminder of This week’s program

Each workday of WOLWeek we will be exploring a daily theme to prompt members of the global WOL community to reflect on and share their experiences.  These themes build on Simon Terry‘s Value Maturity Model of Collaboration:

• Monday 18 November: The Benefits of Connection
• Tuesday 19 November: The Benefits of Sharing
• Wednesday 20 November: The Benefits of Solving – Learning
• Thursday 21 November: The Benefits of Solving – Problem Solving
• Friday 22 November: The Benefits of Innovation