Show Your Work

Jane Bozarth

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118863626
• eBook ISBN: 9781118864012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Organizations struggle to capture tacit knowledge. Workers struggle to find answers and information across organizational databases and boundaries and silos. New comfort with social sharing, combined with the proliferation of new social tools, offer easy, useful means of sharing not just what we do but how we get things done. For the organization this supports productivity, improves performance, encourages reflective practice, speeds communication, and helps to surface challenges, bottlenecks, and that elusive tacit knowledge. For the worker it illuminates strengths, talents, struggles, and the reality of how days are spent. For the coworker or colleague it solves a problem, saves time, or builds on existing knowledge. And for management it helps to capture who does what, and how, and otherwise makes visible so much of what is presently opaque.

What does showing work mean? It is an image, video, blog post, or use of another tool, or just talking to describe how you solved a problem, show how you fixed the machine, tell how you achieved the workaround, explain how you overcame objections to close the deal, drew the solution to the workflow problem, or photographed the steps you took as you learned to complete a new task. Some of the most effective examples of showing work offer someone explaining how/why they failed, and how they fixed it. Show Your Work offers dozens of examples of individuals and groups showing their work to the benefit of their organizations, their industries, and themselves.

Show Your Work offers dozens of real examples of showing work, supported with tips for how to help it happen, how leaders can lead by showing their own work, and how L&D can extend its reach by showing its own work and helping others show theirs.

If what you’re doing isn’t worth sharing, then why are you doing it?

“This Is How I Do That.”

TOPIARIES

While it isn’t exactly “teaching,” per se, showing your work can go a long way toward helping others learn.

Pearl Fryar, one of South Carolina’s treasures, owns a gorgeous topiary garden he makes free to the public. He’s a popular speaker and frequently provides demonstrations of his work to community organizations. Taking up a pair of electric clippers, he goes to work on a plant, just talking through what he’s doing as he goes: “This is how I do that.” Likewise, there are thousands of YouTube videos on everything from “Here’s How I Built That Deck” to “How I Use PowerPoint to Create Custom Art” to “How I play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on a Guitar.” This can be enormously helpful to the practitioner trying to learn, especially one who’s a bit past the basics and just wants to see someone else’s practice. Want to know more about Pearl Fryar and his work? He’s the subject of the indie film documentary A Man Named Pearl.

DOCTORS IN SURGERY WEARING GOOGLE GLASS

Lucien Engelen of ReShape Glass describes initial experiments in having surgeons wear Google Glass while performing operations. Rather than duplicate existing medical video technologies, he found that Glass (which can be broadcast live as well as be recorded for later viewing) gave observers a better first-person view of the work. Unlike technology that allowed for fixed-camera or over-the-shoulder views, Google Glass allows students to look through the surgeon’s eyes.

DETAILED BRANCHING E-LEARNING SCENARIO

Graphic artist and instructional designer Kevin Thorn’s award-winning online course “Mission: Turfgrass” takes the learner on a journey more sophisticated than the usual read-click-read-click.

As learners complete the “mission” objectives they accumulate items in a rucksack.

Building this requires careful hyperlinking between the slides (learner achieves objective 1, item goes into rucksack, learner begins objective 2... learner skips to objective 4...). To illustrate how this was built, Thorn offers this schematic.

COOKIES BECOME A BUSINESS

Here’s a true story of the payoffs of showing work, adapted from an article that first appeared in Learning Solutions Magazine. Gloria Mercer, a retired elementary school art teacher, needed surgery on her dominant hand in October 2011 and was told she’d have to find a way to rebuild her strength and dexterity. Thinking, “You should mix something fun with something you need to do, right?” she decided to teach herself to create elaborately decorated bakery-style cookies. Gloria started with YouTube videos, many provided by bloggers whose work she then followed. A lot of her learning was through practice and trial-and-error. And along the way she decided to share her project with her Facebook friends, mostly because she investing so much time in it and was learning so much from others who were showing their work. Many of her photos included comments about what she was learning, and how.

As Gloria became familiar with the videos and blogs, she developed a growing awareness of an existing active community of people with similar interests. She began engaging with some of the bloggers, asking questions and sharing her own answers. Gloria’s daughter Marlo and Gloria’s friend Whitney, seeing Gloria’s creations on Facebook, decided they wanted to learn, too. Soon they started sharing what they were learning; all were participating with the explicit mutual goal of getting better at their new craft (per Etienne Wenger, this is the very definition of a community of practice). As they worked they emerged as contributing members of a true community of practice, with production of artifacts (recipes, actual cookies, and pictures of them), a repertoire (libraries of cutters and techniques mastered, like cartoon characters and airbrushing, and a specialized vocabulary with meaning mostly for other cookie bakers). As they went along, their friends watched, encouraged, suggested cookie ideas, and commented. Eventually, Gloria began teaching others.

Now? Gloria continues to work on her technique, but cookies remain for her only a hobby. Marlo started and operates Coastline Cookies in Midlothian, VA, USA. Whitney started and operates Beach House Cookies in Virginia Beach, VA, USA.

January 3, 2012

January 10

January 13

January 18. Gloria says she still can’t make her hand and icing “do what she wants.” Gloria’s daughter Marlo, 125 miles away, joins in, as does Gloria’s friend Whitney. Gloria describes the need to “stop and stand back” when learning to decorate.

February 2012: Marlo and her husband Mike begin taking orders for cookies. Marlo obtains a busin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Benefits to Organizations
• Workers: What’s In It For You?
• What Is Knowledge? and Why Do People Share It?
• “This Is How I Do That.”
• Learning & Development
• How?
• Index
• End User License Agreement