Summerclass "Show your work" - Jane Bozarth, Part 2

It has been a month since our Arboth colleague Karen Philips attended the VOV/Stimulearning Summerclass of Jane Bozarth about "Show your work". And still, the ideas of Jane are omnipresent at our office. As mentioned in the previous blogpost - a promise is a promise - here are some more practical tips on how you can "Show your work" too.

As an individual:

• First of all, be aware that your knowledge is not always explicit. Even though you might be a punctual person writing down everything you do, you are probably forgetting the (for you at least) obvious items: the "how"-part.

  As an example: try to explain to one another how to make a club sandwich (or in Dutch: "een smoske kaas/hesp"). You will see that you or your colleague is referring to different steps in the process, you might even use different ingredients.

• And second, some questions to help you be more reflective about your work:

  • What did you do today?

  • What did you do well?

  • Did your expectations meet reality?

  • If you would start over what would you do differently?

  • What or who surprised you today?

  • If you lacked some knowledge, how could you correct that?

  • What did you learn?

  Keep these questions close to you and try to answer them on a regular basis for yourself. Write down one or two take-aways and make it a habit!

• Third, you now have some ideas written down: Why not share them with other people?
  This can be scary, or you might have other ideas why not to share (see the previous blogpost on this topic) but try it and think in little steps:

  • Who woud be interested in this? Who else could benefit from it?
    Think about your peers, your direct colleagues, friends or family

  • Then think bigger: maybe another team in your organization could benefit as well? Your managament team? Or in Facebook-terms, a friend-of-a-friend?

  • As soon as you have hit the previous hurdle, just go global! Tell the world what you 've been upto! You never know who can benefit from what you have discovered / learned / …

  What comes around goes around. One day, you will also benefit from somebody else's knowledge, and you probably already have!

In your team:

It would of course be best if your entire team is showing their work, not only you. But reality is often different. What ideas are there for not showing work? Try to get a grasp on this.

• Do employees think of company knowledge as something that needs to be protected?

• As something that needs limited access?

• Is it common to share goals and achievement with other teams?

• Is it common to share failures or unsuccessfull attempts?

• Is it common to seek help from other teams?

• Does your team share work that is not yet finished?

• Does your team use knowledge that was contributed to by other groups? Etc.

I believe this could be a very interesting discussion!

The role of Learning & Development?

In all of this L&D has a role to play. Think of L&D as the people who can facilitiate to surface knowledge:

• Supporting learning when working, in the flow of work.

• Helping people capture (picture or video), publish and find information. Also, think about naming conventions!

• Setting up training for how to use tools to share information.

• Are there platforms for sharing information?

• Are there already some processes in place?

• Think about new roles to fulfill: curator, community manager,…

• Making it possible for people to meet. Make sure links originate within the company for people to find eachother.

• And most of all, bu setting the example!

Did you Show Your Work already?

You can leave a comment if you did!