- 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 one-eighth 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 wanna sort of 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. And we run into these problems in the workplace all the time. If you have 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 maybe worked in an organization on a big project or tried to execute some new task and found out afterward that someone else 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 that you encountered?" Or, "How did you overcome that or speed that up?" Maybe do the same thing if you have traditional sort of 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 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, you know, stuck away in an email. But find a place where we can all find each other's work, you know, get a look at it and better see how everybody gets things done. © 2022 Mind Tools by Emerald Works Limited.