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Dr Jane Bozarth is Director of Research at The eLearning Guild in California, and author of "e-Learning on a Shoestring," "From Analysis to Evaluation," "Better Than Bullet Points," and "Show Your Work."
People are great about documenting what they do, but we often struggle with how to communicate how we get things done.
A lot of times in workshops on this topic I'll ask groups to write out the steps involved in making a peanut butter and jam sandwich.
And you see people really struggle in earnest to write down what they know, to write down how to execute this task.
And you see them writing things like, "Carefully maneuver knife to center of bread on right side without dropping jelly. Working from center out, use knife blade to spread jelly over the bread, leaving a 1/8th inch border at the edge."
You know, that's great but it's not terribly useful to the person who really doesn't understand what it is you're asking them to do. And at some point you just want to cry out, "Can't we just take a picture of this? Wouldn't it be better if we made a video of this?"
And that's really what working out loud is or showing your work. It's sort of helping you develop a better, more useful way of communicating that information so others can follow it.
We run into these problems in the workplace all the time. If you've ever seen someone diligently document everything they do, they write it all down before they leave a job and then the new person comes in and cannot pick up where they left off.
You see it happen when, yourself, you have worked in an organization on a big project or tried to execute a new task, and found out afterwards that someone had already done it. It's very frustrating and it seems like there ought to be fairly simple answers for how we can overcome some of these. And I propose that one of those answers is getting better at showing our work. So, be looking at processes you already have in place.
Take a look at, for instance, existing reports that you have people submitting. Instead of just listing activities, maybe ask questions like, "What did you learn this week?" or "What were the biggest obstacles you encountered?" or "How did you overcome that or speed that up?"
Maybe do the same thing if you have traditional status-type meetings, where, rather than just have everyone describe activities, say, well, "How did you learn that? Can you show me how you learned that? Can you teach me to do that? What were some takeaways? What were some lessons learned? If you did this again tomorrow, what do you think you might do?"
So, if I had a couple of key things to leave about how to get better at showing our work, I would say take a picture, or make a video, or draw a diagram. But try to break out of this writing out steps that may or may not be helpful to someone else.
And I would say probably the biggest thing is don't just save everything to your C drive. Find a place to put it where it can be shared. Don't let it get hidden in a folder or just get stuck away in an email. Find a place where we can all find each other's work, get a look at it, and better see how everybody gets things done.
Reflective questions:
Once you've watched the video, you may wish to reflect on its content by considering the following questions:
- How effectively do you share knowledge in your organization?
- How could you use technology to get better at "Showing Your Work"?
- What strategies do you have in place to ensure knowledge is retained when someone leaves your organization?
