How Working Out Loud Can Reshape Your Organization

In my last post, I discussed a survey I created that will allow you to measure the level of working out loud occurring in your organization. In this post I want to speculate about the kinds of organizational change and improvement we might see as we are able to more accurately measure the number of employees working out loud in an organization and what happens as that number reaches a critical mass. Here are a few ideas to ponder. I said these are speculations because we won't actually know until enough data have been collected and research done to validate or discredit these ideas.

• By beginning to measure levels of behavior like WOL, we shift the discussion of "adoption" of enterprise social networks from a tool focus to a behavior focus. After all, it's not how many people are using social software that makes a difference to your organization, it's what they are doing with it. For too long adoption has been measured by counting views and posts without really asking why those views and posts are happening and within what context. Measuring WOL is a first step in that direction.
• WOL can amplify the impact of existing group structures such as virtual teams and communities of practice. When their audience and visibility is increased, they are more likely to become more productive and more aligned with enterprise strategy, as views they might not have considered are surfaced by their interactions with the organization at large. Even business processes can benefit. Imagine if you had the attention of the whole organization at your disposal because they are already working out loud in your ESN. You might be able to develop business processes like this where one of the steps in the process is jumping out to your ESN to crowdsource information or decisions:

• Working out loud on an ESN platform means that employees will most likely increase their "ambient awareness," or as Wikipedia says, "the sort of omnipresent knowledge one experiences by being a regular user of media outlets that allow a constant connection with one's social circle." This ambient awareness is the same kind of awareness you get by overhearing hallway conversations or the phone call happening in the cubicle next to yours. When we expand that effect to the whole enterprise, we should expect to see better decisions being made, better alignment to strategic direction, and better cultural understanding across business areas and geographic regions.
• There is a model in knowledge management circles known as PAIR (for Productivity, Agility, Innovation, and Reputation). These are believed to be the four competitive advantages most improved by good KM practices. Referring back to my previous post, you may recall the definition of WOL = observable work + narrating your work. If observable work is mostly done by teams and narrating done by individuals, we might expect to see that increases in observable work lead to increases in productivity, while increases in narration of work lead to increased innovation. In a WOL culture, teams can break bottlenecks by getting questions answered more quickly. They can avoid costly mistakes if seen and corrected by others who have already experienced them. Research has shown that teams that are thrown together quickly reach consensus faster when they have pre-existing shared mental models, just the kind of thing that ambient awareness helps create. And when individuals narrate their work, a rich accumulation of knowledge is created that is available at any time (see "If Knowledge is Power, then Working Out Loud is the Generator"). Innovation should increase because that knowledge is not only shareable immediately throughout the organization but will still be available even years later, perhaps when an idea is more fully formed and ready to take advantage of it. Agility and Reputation build on Productivity and Innovation. So for example if your company is both innovative and productive, it stands to reason that it is probably also agile, having the ability to take new ideas and quickly convert them into reality. And reputation is often enhanced by being good at all three of the others (think of how Apple got their reputation). You could sum it up graphically like this:

• Finally, I expect WOL to have a large part to play in the future of work. There is much current discussion of how organizations, in order to be able to adapt to rapid change, need to become flatter, more networked, and self-organizing. You may have heard terms relating to this such as wirearchy, holacracy, fractal organizations, maybe even enterprises described as autopoietic or complex adaptive systems. What these models all have in common is the idea of the firm of the future being highly networked with very little hierarchy. But for all its many faults, one service that hierarchy performs is to provide communication channels throughout the company. So for these new models to take hold, some new way of communicating is going to have to take hierarchy's place. WOL can create the nodes that allow for connection and communication across the enterprise in all directions, not just up and down the management chain. Pulling all the above pieces together, you start to see how central WOL may become to successful companies of the future:

But first, before we can determine if any of what I said above is correct, we have to be able to measure WOL. So feel free to make use of the survey I detailed in the previous post. I'm sure there's much here that can be refined, but at least it's a starting point.