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cclkestis · 5 years

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an unexpected surprise.

me: I haven’t written fic in forever so this’ll probably just be a short drabble

bastard man: I think the fuck not.

anyway here’s an attempt at some soft, pre-ffh fishbowl that nobody asked for because I like to imagine him being like this at one point, mostly written in an m&m fueled fever but hey, I actually wrote something so that counts right? a happy birthday for @the-darklings (it’s still the 19th, I made it in time !!) that spiraled majorly out of control, but is anyone really surprised? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Quentin.”

You know he hears the nearly exasperated edge to the one word, your apparent impatience betrayed by the smile you would never be able to hide from him.

“Don’t you think you’re being a tad overdramatic here?”

A familiar low chuckle is your only response for a moment, the sound smooth as honey and able to trap you just as easily.

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, honey – I’m simply making sure the surprise isn’t ruined.”

His hands remained firmly over your eyes, obscuring your vision and trapping you in a darkness that might otherwise be unnerving. But you trusted him, able to feel his warmth at your back as he used his own body to carefully guide your path without letting any light break through his fingers.

“You know I told you not to make a big deal about things, I don’t exactly enjoy thinking about the fact that I’m another year older, you know?”

He chuckles again but, although you can’t see it, a frown graces his features for only a second at the hint of genuine anxiety he detects in your voice. That wouldn’t do, not on today of all days.

“Well you also know that I’m not very good at listening – plus today should be all about you and celebrating your life, not worrying about it.”

Your previously steady steps faltered, breath catching in your throat as what started out as a joking conversation took on an underlying seriousness with his comment.

The statement was spoken with such sincerity, such confidence, that you couldn’t help but want to believe it.

Would there ever come a day you didn’t marvel at the man’s way with words, you wondered.

Probably not.

Sensing your sudden shift in mood and adjusting his own steps to accommodate the stumble in yours, Quentin almost wondered if perhaps he’d said the wrong thing – very rarely could someone make him doubt himself, yet somehow you managed it with a startling degree of frequency.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand how you speak these things into existence - you are a dangerous man, Quentin Beck.”

Any fears were easily assuaged when that light teasing returned to your tone, tension leaving your shoulders as you simply shook your head a little with a grin curling at the corners of your lips.

That was more like it.

“Maybe so. But you love me anyway.”

Spoken with that same almost obnoxious confidence, you could only hum in agreement and playfully jab him in the side with your elbow in response, feigning the same air of impatience you’d held earlier as your pace picked up once more and you gave his comment no other acknowledgement.

“This surprise better be worth all of the build-up now, if this turns out to be some sort of joke I’m not speaking to you anymore.”

Your decision to avoid vocally responding to his previous comment did not go unnoticed by the man behind you, but your unspoken agreement was more than enough. He knew that you cared for him – more than he cared for you, you would argue, but he knew that to be a lie.

You were more important to him than anything.

It was a fact he kept to himself, shown only through the tenderness and soft moments he shared with you.

Few people saw this side of him and he intended to keep it that way for the time being – he couldn’t risk letting his competitors see anything but the charismatic, stubborn and, quite frankly, somewhat menacing side of him.

That Quentin would always be the one those people would see – the one they would listen to without hesitation when he so easily convinced them to disclose the valuable information he needed from them.

Today, however, he was your Quentin.

“I thought you were supposed to be the patient one here,” This prompted a laugh from you, a bright sound that echoed off the walls around you as he used his hold to gently pull you to a stop in front of the currently locked door in your way. “Alright, we’re almost there. I’m trusting you to keep your eyes shut for a second, though.”

You rolled your eyes at that, biting back the urge to make another snarky comment like you really wanted to – despite your protests about Quentin making a fuss about your birthday, you were genuinely curious now about what he was being so secretive about.

So instead, you nodded.

Giving you another few moments to ensure your eyes were closed and you weren’t going to look, he removed one hand to reach for something that you, obviously, couldn’t see – you could still hear, though, and the affirmative beep that met your ears was an all too familiar one.

“We’re at the lab? Why are we – “

Your pondering was cut short by a hand covering your mouth whilst genuine confusion overtook you, mind puzzling through every possible reason he might have brought you there of all places, especially when nobody on the team was scheduled to be in working.

“Trust me.”

There it was again. That smoothness, the soothing timbre in his voice leaving you no option but to listen to him and inherently trust that whatever you were about to see would all become clear soon enough.

A rare, genuine smile brightened Quentin’s face as he proceeded to lead you towards the open space in the centre of the room, able to feel the slight resistance as your head swivelled in an attempt to listen for more clues.

You’d done it again, so effortlessly. Impressed him. He hadn’t anticipated that you’d be able to guess where you were from such a seemingly insignificant sound, although perhaps he should have. You were smart and he knew it – there was a reason he’d grown so attached to you, enjoying your company as the two of you spent hour upon hour working together.

Positioning you in the empty space, cleared for the purposes of testing the project you’d both been working on for so long with little success, his fingers tensed and pressed into your skin for the briefest of seconds – a silent request for you to continue keeping your eyes closed.

With the complete removal of his hands, the temptation to open your eyes and investigate your surroundings was stronger than you might have imagined - especially when you heard Quentin’s retreating footsteps.

“If you’ve brought me here to trick me into working more, it’s not going to happen.”

Standing alone, disoriented by your lack of vision, you were searching for an assurance that he’d not just walked off and left you standing there like some sort of idiot. Not that you really believed he would do that to you.

“You’ve caught me, you figured it out,” His voice was distant now from where he stood by the outskirts of the room, attention focused on the screens in front of him, but the dry humour in the comeback was unmissable. “Your big birthday surprise is actually a day at work with me – just the two of us.”

“You say that like it’s not necessarily a good thing.”

There was no hesitation in your retaliation, and he wouldn’t deny being pleasantly surprised by the speed at which you threw it back at him. Smart and didn’t miss a trick.

Fingers nimbly flying across the keyboard, he left your words hanging in the air – glancing up to notice the shifting in your stance, waiting on another answer he wasn’t going to give you the satisfaction of hearing.

It warmed something in him to know that you enjoyed his company as much as he took delight in yours. It added to the slight tremble in his hands as they worked that he couldn’t entirely pinpoint the cause of.

Maybe it was the anticipation of seeing your reaction to what he’d brought you here to show you. Or maybe it came from the sudden worry that it wouldn’t work as it had the day before, and he’d be faced with your disappointment - a look he never wanted to see crossing your face ever again if he could avoid it.

The drones sitting on the work benches all around the room hummed to life as his hands stilled, finger hovering over the final key he needed to press.

Maybe later he would tell you that originally he hadn’t planned anything special for your birthday, as you’d requested. Would tell you that he’d been working late the previous night and had finally cracked it, and wanted you to be the first one to see.

Maybe. It was a conversation that could happen later, if ever.

For now, there were more important things. Your head had jerked round in response to the new sound in the room and he could see your unease with his silence beginning to grow, a sign that it was time. Still, however, your eyes remained closed – another indication of your complete faith in him.

He’d made you wait long enough.

“Alright,” Raising his voice to be heard over the ambient hum surrounding you, he instantly held your full attention. Hitting the last button, his eyes remained steadily fixed on you as the drones all started to lift into the air and swirl around high above your head. “Count to five, then open your eyes.”

The noises surrounding you were unrecognisably familiar, a sound that you had heard so often yet in the moment, with the anticipation racing through your veins, you couldn’t place.

There was an excitement in Quentin’s voice that you’d not heard in a long time, especially not within this room, so you indulged his request and counted out loud – you had no doubt that he’d be watching you like a hawk to see your reaction to –

You really hadn’t had any clue as to what you were going to see, but opening your eyes presented you with a scene you could never have imagined.

Trees surrounded you on all sides, sunlight filtering through their branches and leaves in a way that made everything seem greener and more vibrant – more beautiful.

It didn’t happen often, but the sight left you speechless – exactly the reaction Quentin had been hoping for. He couldn’t see you directly any longer, inside the illusion, but, with an assortment of cameras easily to hand, your expression of wonder was one he didn’t miss.

There it is.

“Wow.”

Little more than a whisper, he still heard it clearly.

“I told you it’d be worth it.”

Hearing his voice, you spun on your heel to follow it yet were only confronted by the same stunning landscape surrounding you.

Usually you were quicker off the mark, but it was only now you realised just how you were seeing what was around you and hearing his disembodied voice.

“You got it working?”

You didn’t intend to sound so shocked – Quentin was brilliant, if anyone was going to figure it out in the end it would be him – but your disbelief was undeniably endearing to the man that no offence was taken. But he didn’t need to let you know that, of course.

“No need to sound so surprised,” With one last glance at your face on the screen, Quentin stepped away from it. “I always told you I would figure it out. I just needed to find the right…motivation.”

“Always the modest one, aren’t you, Quent?”

Your attention was caught by a bird soaring over your head, carrying with it the illusion of a breeze that rustled everything around you. Knowing the technology behind it did nothing to diminish the spectacle.

Stepping through the illusion to join you in the scene, Quentin spotted an opportunity in your moment of distraction and approached you from behind and catch you in a strong embrace that elicited a squeak of a laugh from you.

“Of course, it would never have been possible without you, so really I could argue that you got it working.”

With his lips by your ear, his voice dropped into that tone that never failed to send a shiver up your spine.

His arms around your waist trapped you against him, preventing you from turning to face him as you wanted. Instead you let your head tilt back to rest on his shoulder, swaying with him and contemplating his words.

Sure, you’d spent at least as much time on the project as he had, but everyone knew that he was really the brains behind the entire operation. Still, your contributions were more than valuable to the working prototype now surrounding you.

“Let’s just say that we got it working and leave it at that. Deal?”

You feel his frame shake with a silenced laugh at your stubbornness and usual unwillingness to take credit for the work you put in, but on this occasion elected not to fight you on the matter. It was your birthday, after all. Whatever you wanted.

“Deal.”

Relinquishing his hold on you just a little, he spun you so that he could see your face and the glowing, contagious smile lighting your features.

“So, tell me – do you still think I was being…what was the word? Overdramatic about all of this?”

With one hand he vaguely gestured around you both before it came to cup your cheek, thumb brushing over it as you leaned into the touch.

“Yes.” Again, your biting response came with a grin and no hesitation. “But I appreciate it, I really do. It’s…incredible, to see it working after everything that’s happened so far? We’ve spent so long working to get here and -”

A shriek tumbled from your lips as there was a sudden sparking far too close for comfort and the image around you started to crackle and break up, causing you to flinch closer to Quentin – whose grip on you tightened, tugging you closer to him and dipping his head as a buzzing alarm sounded, irritatingly loud.

The illusion broke completely when one of the drones struck the solid floor with a loud clatter only a couple of feet from you both, disconnected from the others and no doubt throwing up all sorts of errors.

Only when he was certain that none of the others were going to follow and meet a similar broken fate did the man holding you draw back enough to examine you, a spike of fear sending his heart racing in his chest – although he’d never admit it – at the sudden realisation that you could’ve been hurt because he’d thought this was a good idea.

“Looks like I may have spoken too soon.”

There was a shakiness to your voice and the hint of a laugh that you breathed out as your hands slid up to cover his own that were now cradling your face. Your gaze lifted to see him looking down at you, a worry in those hypnotising eyes that you rarely saw.

“But it was working. We can fix it again.”

This time it was you who instilled that confidence in him, instead of the usual other way around. He recognised and adored that spark of determination glimmering within you, simply another reason you were so interesting to him.

Despite your earlier protest about working today, you could feel that familiar itching in your fingers – a desire to pull apart the busted machine and figure out what was wrong, to recreate the peaceful moment again.

“We can,” He agreed with you, the worry being replaced with a sly smile. “But not today.”

You’d always been tricky to read, but Quentin was very good at reading people – a fact that you were reminded of when he seemed to read the thought that’d been on your mind.

“It’s not like I have anything else to do.”

There it was. A challenge. On this occasion, sadly, it was one that he was going to have to end before it could entirely start.

“You do, actually.”

Watching your eyebrows shoot up in surprise, before a suspicion clouded your expression, only stoked his newfound entertainment regarding the current situation.

“Do I, now?” The challenge was still there in your question. “Please, enlighten me then.”

“Dinner. Tonight, at my place.”

Anticipating the soft smack you sent towards him, he easily caught your wrist in one smooth movement as his other hand slipped to press a finger over your lips and silence the complaint he knew you were about to make.

“Nothing special or fancy. I promise.”

Your sigh of defeat and amused shake of your head was the only response he got as you fiddled with the collar of his shirt. You didn’t want to make a big deal of things, but Quentin’s earlier words sprang back to mind – he’d never been the best at listening or following instructions given to him.

Not unless they suited his best interests.

“I really hate you sometimes, I hope you realise that.”

There was no bite to the words, no malice or truth behind them as you tried and failed to pin him with a disapproving look, to have it ruined by the softened smile and the way he was looking at you.

“No, you don’t.” A hand slipped to the small of your back and he used it to pull you closer, pressing a kiss to your forehead and simply holding you there as he smiled against your skin.

It was nice, having someone to share this softer side of himself with.

“Happy birthday, (name).”

#happy birthday friend !! this is super late our time but i wanted to get this finished for u today!! i hope you've had a good day <33 #quentin beck x reader #quentin beck #this might be 2.9k words of nonsense but i had fun and that's what counts #plus it's a Concept #aka i had no idea what i was really doing #would have been up earlier if i hadn't fallen asleep on the couch for 2 hours shshshshs #my writing #ffh spoilers #i guess technically #spoilers #god i hate him so much #long post #just in case

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johntropea · 7 years

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We have always been “working out loud”, until...

Back in 2010 in a blog interview I quoted something by Euan Semple that was quite simple but yet profound:

...these new social platforms can finally legitimise informal networks

I recently came across a similar sentiment by Carrie Basham Young:

...leveraging the human social network that already exists amongst your employees.

But now it’s amplified!

Yep, back in the day when we didn’t have online technologies, we just the same connected to our personal networks to get things done. This is nothing new, now it’s just amplified, now we can connect to even more than our personal network, now we can have an ambient awareness of the pulse of an organisation.

But unlike the old days this ambient awareness can cause more noise than signal. We are exposed to more information. This is a fact of our online times. And what is required is the onus, time and effort on us to adapt and build new skills of selecting sources, we sculpture the information flow to a picture we like. Note: In an organisation the role of an online community manager helps facilitate this new skill [more on this later]

Back in 2007, Andy McAfee described how our new online social tools amplify our personal networks of the past by enabling us to discover a myriad of people we would not normally encounter:

Consider the prototypical knowledge worker...She has a relatively small group of close collaborators; these are people with whom she has strong professional ties. Beyond this group, there’s also a set that includes people she worked on a project with in the past, coworkers who she interacts with periodically, colleagues she knows via an introduction, and the many other varieties of ‘professional acquaintance.’...

Beyond this group there’s a still-larger set of fellow employees who could be valuable to our prototypical knowledge worker if only she knew about them. These are people who could keep her from re-inventing the wheel, answer one of her pressing questions, point her to exactly the right resource, tell her about a really good vendor, consultant, or other external partner, let her know that they were working on a similar problem and had made some encouraging progress, or do any of the other scores of good things that come from a well-functioning tie. By the same token, if our focal worker is a person of good will, there are many other people in the company she could help if her existence, work experiences, and abilities were more widely known.

Working out loud aligns with where most good ideas come from

So our new enterprise social tools provide the opportunity for the emergence of even more value than the old days. People are more visible now, we can reach and exchange with people outside of our regular personal network.

But there’s another added value here, which I learnt from Clay Shirky, based on Social Scientist Ronald Burt’s thesis “The Social Origin of Good Ideas”. That most good ideas come from connecting with people on the periphery and within other social networks (called “Bridging Capital”)

Clay Shirky Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations.

The essence of Burt's thesis comes down to a linked pair of observations. First, most good ideas came from people who were bridging "structural holes," which is to say people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department. Second, bridging these structural holes was valuable even when other variables, such as rank and age (both of which correlate for higher degrees of social connection), were controlled for. Note that this experiment was a test for bridging capital, not mere sociability-the highest percentage of good ideas came from people whose contacts were outside their own department. On the other hand, managers who were highly connected, but only to others in their department, had ideas that were not ranked as highly.

Bridging predicted good ideas; lack of bridging predicted bad ones.

In Burt's analysis, a dense social network of people in the same department (and who were therefore likely to be person ally connected to one another) seemed to create an echo-chamber effect.

Bridges help get work done quicker and better.

Andy McAfee, based on sociologist Mark Granovetter’s paper "The Strength of Weak Ties", put the concept of “bridging capital” in the context of using online enterprise social networks to getting work done. Something we can now do better compared to the old days.

Andy McAfee The Ties that Find:

Strong ties and weak ties are exactly what they sound like. Strong ties between people arise from long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions; weak ties from infrequent and more casual ones. The ‘problem’ with strong ties is that if persons A and B have a strong tie, they’re also likely to be strongly tied to all members of each other’s networks. In other words, there’s likely to be a lot of overlap in their friendship circles.

This might be a good thing in many ways, but it’s bad news if A needs a piece of knowledge that she can’t find inside her own friendship circle. Because of the overlap, B’s circle is likely to be redundant with A’s, and so unhelpful to her. In other words, her tie to B does her little good in her search for knowledge. If A and C have a weak tie, however, many of C’s friends are likely to be strangers to A, and so are good resources as she looks to inform herself.

A tidy summary of SWT’s conclusion is that strong ties are unlikely to be bridges between networks, while weak ties are good bridges. Bridges help solve problems, gather information, and import unfamiliar ideas. They help get work done quicker and better. The ideal network for a knowledge worker probably consists of a core of strong ties and a large periphery of weak ones. Because weak ties by definition don’t require a lot of effort to maintain, there’s no reason not to form a lot of them (as long as they don’t come at the expense of strong ties).

Scott Ward has an excellent example of brokerage across clusters or silos. He shares an example of how a shout-out to the network resulted in oil & gas engineers applying techniques used by concreters to solve their problem of oil freezing in the arctic.

Valdis Krebs talks about this optimal professional network in a memorable way:

Distant/weak ties help you figure out what to do, and local/strong ties help you do it.

Lose the person, you lose their network that made them valuable

...or sometimes known as “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”

We all rely on our personal networks to get work done. And when we lose an employee, we don’t just lose them, they also take with them the connections to (not the people) of how they got their work done. A new person in their role, however intelligent they are, have not yet had time to build a personal network to effectively and efficiently get work done.

But what if the previous person practiced “working out loud”. The new person can see how they did their work, who they went to for what to help them make decisions and complete work...now that’s utterly valuable!

Derek Irvine says this very thing:

As Josh points out, the HR pro is missing the key trigger here. Bob is not a cog in a machine that can be switched out.

Bob’s connections – his interactions with others, his conversations, his relationships – that’s what made Bob a valuable contribution to the organization.

If you insist on the “machine” metaphor, losing Bob would be more equivalent to removing both the Bob “cog” and all the surrounding gears, springs and connecting wires.

Work today is more about the networks we interact in, the people we interact with as we transact business. When we lose an employee, either through actual leaving the workplace or just disengagement in the work, we lose all they bring with their networks and interactions on a daily basis.

For a social network analysis visual on this, take a look at Valdis Krebs insightful post:

While Maria, after years of her true worth being ignored, leaves the company. The removal of Maria’s node from the network creates a gaping hole in the information flow and knowledge exchange in her workgroup. This absence (Maria and her connections) soon starts to affect the output of the whole group. Deadlines are be missed, mistakes are not caught, and poor decisions percolate throughout, causing unforeseen problems. Her replacement does not have the same network that she had developed over the years. Of course the division manager will not understand what is happening — he will not have his current insight into how his organization works. He will watch, as his once productive organization, fails to execute properly, and wonder why.

But what happened between the old days, and now?

Why this post? Online Community Managers, Champions and Change Agents are here to lead us out of the dark, into a reprise of "working out loud”.

What happened? Well we lost the old age of "working out loud” to the dawn of the digital age where productivity, thanks to personal computing, went less public and more private.

Back in 2010 we called it “observable work”, now it’s called “working out loud”. Basically when something happened we all knew about it, because we sat in the open, our productivity and communications were non-digital, therefore in the open to see. What happened in the office was observable, but this changed with private offices, communicating with email, and using online productivity tools, that is, work became less observable.

The main point of this post is that new enterprise social networks are a type of reprise to what was good about the old days, making work observable again.

Although he didn’t use the term, I first learnt about “observable work” from Jim McGee. (perhaps Jon Udell was where I first heard the term.)

As a knowledge worker, much of what I get paid for happens inside my own head. Before the advent of a more or less ubiquitous digital environment, however, that head work used to generate a variety of markers and visible manifestations. That visibility was important in several ways that weren’t evident until they disappeared:

Seeing work in progress in front of me made it possible to gauge my progress and make connections between disparate elements of my work.

Different physical representations helped to quickly establish how baked a particular idea was.

Physically shared work spaces supported rich social interactions that enriched the final deliverables and contributed to the learning of multiple individuals connected to the effort.

For all the productivity gains that accrue to the digitization of knowledge work, one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible, making it harder to manage and improve such work. The benefits of visibility are now something that we need to seek mindfully instead of getting them for free from the work environment.

Greg Lloyd points to a quote from Thomas Steward’s book “The Wealth of Knowledge” where a character read his superior’s letters, getting insight into the skills it took to make decisions at this level, something his colleagues were not privy to. Nowadays the equivalent of these letters are emails, but for more reach and potential value (the whole point of this post), the letters would be more visible as posts on online social networks

“A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” said Herman Melville’s Ishmael; when it came to learning my job, circulating correspondence was mine. Reading my superiors’ letters opened a window into how they conducted business with the world outside; I aped things more experienced colleagues did, and saw how they handled tricky situations; I copied useful addresses into my Rolodex (another antique). I learned who knew what, and that made me better at asking for advice.”

Michael Idinopulos shares a story to illustrate how we lost “observable work”

"In the old place, when a broker got a tip about an upcoming earnings announcement or a CEO departure, we all knew about it instantly. You could actually watch the information roll across the floor like a wave, going from one desk to the next, to the next until everyone in the office was talking about it. Now we sit in our private offices, we close our doors, and nobody has the slightest idea what's going on."

That remains the best description of Enterprise 1.0 I have ever heard--which is why I still remember the comment over 20 years later.

Many of us today sit in the digital equivalent of Grandaddy's shiny, new, and very private office. We have powerful computers with big shiny screens and powerful tools for managing documents and sending messages. We have BlackBerries and iPhones. And in one respect, we're more connected than ever before.

But there's something missing. It's all private. Sure we can email each other. Occasionally we even take the bold step of picking up a phone. But there's no ambient awareness. There's no serendipitous discovery of what a colleague is doing. There's no wave of information that rolls instantly down the shop floor.

Enterprise 2.0 is all about leaving the private office and returning to that big, open space with the wave of information rolling from one desk to the next to the next.

The dawn of the “Work in progress” culture

I’ve mentioned that we have always connected to our personal networks to get work done. And that a difference now is we have potential for more signal than we did in the old days due to “ambient awareness”. But this comes at a cost, requiring new skills in “noise cancellation.” But it’s worth it because the better we can connect to people around the edges of our network, the better we are at getting work done.

It has led us into a reprise of “observable work” or “work in progress” or “working out loud”. Whatever we call it, with the support of online community managers we can begin to move from a “private by default” to “public by default” way of working. A shift from “personal computing” to “social computing.”

And again from Jim McGee:

One unintended consequence of today's technology environment is to make the process of knowledge work less visible just when we need it to be more so. The end products of knowledge work are already highly refined abstractions; a financial analysis, project plan, consulting report, or article. Today, the evolution from germ of an idea through intermediate representations and false starts to finished product exists, if at all, as a series of morphing digital representations and ephemeral feedback interactions.

Let me go way back for a counterexample. I started consulting before the advent of the PC. When you had a final presentation to prepare for the client, you started with a pad of paper and a pencil and roughed out a set of slides. You could see that it was a draft and the erasures and cross outs and arrows made that even more obvious. This might be two weeks before the final deadline. Then, you took it to Evelyn in the graphics department down on the eighth floor. After she yelled at you for how little lead time you had given her, she handed your incomprehensible draft to one of the commercial artists in her group. They spent several days hand-lettering your draft and building the graphs and charts. They sent you back a copy of their work.

Then you started another iterative process of correcting and amending this product. Copies got circulated and marked up by the manager and the partner on the project. At the end, the client got to see it and you hoped you'd gotten it right.

All along the way in this old style process, the work was visible. That meant that the more junior members of the team could learn how the process unfolded and how the final product grew over time. You, as a consultant, could see how the different editors and commentators reacted to different parts of the product.

While today's tools have made the journey from germ of an idea to finished product so much easier, they have also made it harder by making it less visible. It's my sense that most of us don't even see what we've inadvertently given up. It takes a conscious act of will to think about how to use today's tools in ways can give us both the productivity of the new and the process value hidden in the old accidental visibility.

Again from Michael Idinopulos:

In the old days, people collaborated in private. They talked to their friends and colleagues, wrote letters. Later they sent emails. All the real thinking happened in those private conversations. Eventually, once the key insights had been extracted, refined, and clarified, they published: books, articles, speeches, blast memos, etc.

To me, the really exciting thing that’s happening in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is that more and more of those private “pre-publication” interactions are happening in public (or at least semi-public). I think of this as the dawn of the “Work in Progress” culture. We no longer think that something has to be finished before we let strangers into the conversation.”

I first read about the move from away from “finished product” to “work in progress” from Nathan Wallace:

The time taken to correctly phrase thoughts and distil ideas is unavoidable, but can be minimised by changing our expectation of shared content away from “finished product” towards “work in progress”. Publishing information early and often (rather than infrequently and completely) moves authorship away from essays and succinct conclusions towards sharing of insights and decisions. The ultimate method for sharing without increasing work is to move the work in progress into an open environment (share everything by default).”

Over a decade later “working out loud” is still going strong and advocated by Change Agents like Simon Terry, who is one of the organisers of Working Out Loud Week.

Sharing work in progress with a relevant community is a step towards discovering new people who can help your work or learn together with you. When your goals, status, and current efforts are narrated openly for others to follow, word gets around. Intermediaries can start to make connections between you and those who can help. Your close network ties will find the weak ties who can add value to your work for you.

[...]

Working out loud opens up a wider network of partners for collaborative work and learning because it changes the dynamic from “who you know” to “what the network knows about you”. Working out loud leverages the value of what you don’t know:

“It’s not who you know. It’s who you don’t know and what they know about you.”

Narrating your work

If you are working out loud we will get nuggets of what you have been up to in a day as you work socially online eg questions you asked, updates you shared, etc...In addition to this you can also narrate your day, like you would in a journal. For project management you can think of it as the “Captains log” on Star Trek...doing a dump of the days most important points (what is learnt, where it leads)...only this is in the context of managing a project. I’ve always love this post by Joe Crumpler (IS Manager at Alcoa Fastening Systems) where he asks his project managers to spend 15 minutes a day to post a daily entry of the days key events, accomplishments, risks, actions... Joe says:

We want the story before the book is done

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Think of it as a way of communicating status without the need to sit in meetings or make phone calls. I need you to do this so that I can follow what is going on without interfering with your daily flow… Think of your audience as your team, your customers, and management.

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What happens in the real world is that we hear the story after the fact. Or, more commonly, we hear an excuse after a small miss.

Instead of waiting to find out if a significant future event will happen, the PM may be able to predict the outcome through monitoring the information streams created by members of the project team

Exception handling & Process improvements

Nowadays business as usual is actually dealing with exceptions to processes, and working out loud enables you to reach out for help to solve problems.

John Hagel explains:

In the business world—and especially in IT—we like consistency. We script and automate processes. We design jobs around consistent, repeatable procedures. And, as a result, companies become pretty good at “business as usual.” The problem comes when the unforeseeable and unexpected happens

…The benign phrase we use for how we deal with the resulting chaos of public relations nightmares and natural disasters is exception handling. My own past research suggests employees in a wide range of roles (including IT, customer support, logistics, manufacturing, sales, etc.) spend 60 to 70 percent of their time handling exceptions in one form or another. This means that, for many employees, exceptions are actually the rule, and that how we handle exceptions can become a substantial competitive advantage.

As mentioned at the start, informal networks have always been relied upon to get work done...and now this extends even beyond our weak ties, which is great for reaching out to a vast audience to swarm around a problem. Or perhaps it’s just asking a regular question...you’d be surprised who knows the answer...this enables a shift from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks.

Now that enterprise social network enable us to get around the dysfunctional communication hierarchy, we can more effectively reach out informally to achieve outcomes, where process fails, or doesn’t go...or to simply share improvements to processes.

Online Community Managers can facilitate this change

Last month I came across a post from a fellow online community manager, Becky Benishek, talk of her experience on this theme in the context of the need for an online community manager to nurture, facilitate, hand-hold, host, steward our return to observable work. This is especially so given workers face the psychological biases described in “The 9x effect”, when asked to modify their ritual, or switch to a new tool. Such natural reactions, as Becky has shared in another post, are: “Just another IT thing”...“I don’t have time to go to yet another place” to talk.

I saw Yammer as an opportunity to help my company do more and be more. To enhance--not replace!--the core of what we've been for decades, which is a walk-over-to-each-other's-cubes, answer-a-call-by-the-second-ring-maximum, still-accepting-faxes organization.

You know, person-centered.

Yet with all that, we still have the same challenges other organizations have, such as the bugbear of internal communication. Not always knowing what someone else knows. Not always finding the right people to help make what we're doing better and more efficient for us and our customers.

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Just as you'd nurture your coworkers and customers to make sure they thrive and grow so your business thrives and grows, so must you also nurture the supports you put in place to help them.

Get visible!!

A good way to conclude is with John Stepper, who as authored a book called...wait for it...“Working Out Loud”

It’s hard for people to hire you if they can’t find you, or if they only know you as a piece of paper or a profile, hard to differentiate from any of the others.

Career insurance is simply taking control over your visibility – and your access to opportunities – by using social platforms to purposefully shape your online reputation. In John Stepper’s words:

For career insurance, the key is working out loud. By making your work observable and narrating your work in progress, you create a much richer description of who you are and what you do. And the social nature of this process lends itself to discovering people who are interested in what you do. That growing network is what provides access to a much larger set of opportunities.

Instead of waiting till you need people, working out loud helps you build a purposeful network while you’re working. And instead of trying to fit your career into 2 -pages or a short interview, you’ll have built a rich, public tapestry of your work as a byproduct of working.

Related aspects that resonate and nurture “working out loud”

OBSERVABLE WORK

Narrating your work and Observable work are not the same thing

Invisible work, observable work, tiny work

Tiny work often has immense impact on business performance

Status meetings 2.0

Get visible!

COMMUNITY MANAGER

Community Manager primes the culture

The internal and external community manager

The field of community management

Change agents are the most important fuel

Online community adoption approach and tactics

Understanding that communities don’t ‘launch

What enterprise social network adoption can learn from infomercials!

Community vs Social Media

SHARING EXPERIENCES

Collaboration works best when those involved incorporate personal stories about their lives…

Sharing social experience is key to better teams and awareness

Online space as an enabler for the importance of personal stories in nurturing collaboration

People who identify with one another are more likely to share information proactively

Enterprise social networks support Employee Engagement

ADOPTION

Adoption of Enterprise Social networks is about engagement with each other, not with the platform

Your employee’s consumer behaviour won’t translate to the workplace

Enterprise 2.0 - Two anecdotes that focus on a pain points

Enterprise 2.0 practitioners realise this…

Patterns of enterprise 2.0 adoption, and measurement

Enterprise social network - example of purpose and practice

Shadow IT social networks at work are telling you something…

For sustained user adoption listen to people complain!

Adoption is about activities not tools

Focus adoption on the tangibles

Rethinking your approach to user adoption

Follow the leader to Yammer adoption

It takes more than communications & training to achieve high adoption and desired outcomes.

Your employee’s consumer behaviour won’t translate to the workplace.

ADDED

Relationship value — that can be translated into meaningful and tangible benefits

Connecting to knowledge from one domain, and applied to the needs of another.

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leifratahibct · 6 years

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Introduction to CT: Reflective Journalism

For our first project in Creative Technologies, we were tasked with producing a soundscape from recordings collect from a range of environmental and acoustic sources. The soundscape had to be produced utilizing audio editing software of our choice where or recordings gathered were then manipulated and layered to create a detailed listening experience for listeners being at a length of one half to three minutes. Groups for the project were initially established for gathering recordings on and off campus around Auckland but for the soundscapes they were worked on separately but did not restrict us from associating with others of sharing techniques or ideas we could implement to our own projects or expand upon to develop new ideas and further develop skills with using the editing software. During the studio hours, we were also presented with tutorials to gain new skills and techniques.

This project challenged me as I did not start the degree at the same time as everyone else but rather a little time later meaning that I had to play catch up for much of the project. I had no previous experience with using an audio manipulative software before even when I had studied music in high school I kept to the more classical path by learning to sight read music and implement that to piano exploring creativeness by writing compositions, so to use audio software was a new area of exploration for me. I just explored and fiddled with anything I could making sure I saved regularly as to not destroy my progress with screeching sounds I could not get rid of keeping sounds I thought had some cool effects. I added and removed many different sounds and tried to alter original sounds to create recordings I didn’t have available or made recordings clearer to extract one certain sound in the recordings. There was a lot of twiddling with things in this project which sparked a lot of creativity but also frustrating when I couldn’t get the recording to work properly.

Because the soundscape had to somehow relate to the Anthropocene, which I had no idea that was when I started the course, I went and looked up YouTube videos, web articles and any other sources I could to understand what the Anthropocene was. When thinking of how I would apply the Anthropocene to my soundscape I was pretty much completely stumped. So, I took three things from the Anthropocene and went from there. Humans were the first, so I decided I needed to include human activity in my soundscape which was an easy source of recording to get since there are seven billion people on Earth. Next, I chose ambient nature sounds because they had based a sense of remote places where humans would not necessarily reside which helped me find a contrasting aspect to my soundscape. Thirdly I chose noise pollution because the Anthropocene thrives around human advancement which machines, vehicles, factories all play a big part of.

I think the reason I found this project so challenging was because I couldn’t see a real interest in the project. Usually, when starting projects, I like to find inspiration. Inspiration for me sparks the interest and readiness to feel more engaged with what I am working on. In the article ‘Learner Interest Matters: Strategies for Empowering Student Choice’ (J.McCarthy, 2014) gave me an understanding of why I struggled to find interest in the project as it mentions, “When a topic connects to what students like to do, engagement deepens as they willingly spend time thinking, dialoguing, and creating ideas in meaningful ways.” So, what is it that I like to do? Why did I struggle to find interest? I feel like the reason I wasn’t engaged enough in the project was that I wasn’t there to help the group record sounds which I feel could have sparked a lot of inspiration for me as to find sounds that appealed to me would have aided in my engagement to the project.

One thing that I took away from making the soundscape was how important it is to document the processes involved in experimentation which I did not do quite right during this first project. I was slack with my blogging which with later projects found very useful when experimenting with things. The web article, ‘Experimentation and Reflection’ (C.Quinn, 2017) explores the concept that reflection is important to experimentation. Not only does documenting my experience help me with looking back on things but using blogging as a choice of documentation helps to expand upon ideas with the factor of being able to share these experiences. Quinn mentions, “The second benefit, of course, is when we go beyond ‘sense’ to ‘share’, we can get feedback that can help refine our thinking.” Collaboration sparks more ideas so with the sense of sharing these experimentations we can then expand on them with the responses and questions of others, which is what I feel I should improve on moving for in Creative Technologies.

In a sense, there was much to learn from this first project which I feel was a great introductory project for the course as it explored creativity in many ways in relation to the Anthropocene. Even though using audio manipulative software is not my strong suit it was intriguing having learnt how to use Ableton and I would be very happy to use it again but for different reasons. From this reflection moving forward into future projects I have found that for each project I pursue I should adapt the project to my skills and what I find interesting while keeping to the brief but also making time to document my adaptations of every project to sit back and look at what I've done to analyse new ideas. Possible ways could be to ask myself questions like, what worked well? What didn’t work well? How can I expand on this? Which could help raise more ideas as to not cradle one idea but to expand on what other possibilities I could implement.

References:

McCarthy.J (2014) Learning Interest Matter: Strategies for empowering student choice, Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-learner-interest-matters-john-mccarthy

Quin.C (2017) Experimentation And Reflection. Modern workplace learning. Retrieved from http://modernworkplacelearning.com/magazine/experimentation-and-reflection/

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