Show Your Work

Show Your Work

by Jane Bozarth
Released May 2014
Publisher(s): Pfeiffer
ISBN: 9781118863626

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Book description

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.

Table of contents

  1. Introduction
    1. Call it What you Like
    2. Showing Your Work Isn’t New
    3. Showing Your Work Isn’t Mystical
    4. It’s Not Just for “Knowledge Workers”
    5. Before Anyone Says “Yes, But...”
    6. No One Said it All Had to Be Public
    7. No One Said it Had to Be Instagram
    8. Finally: Showing Your Work is Not About “Information”
  2. Benefits to Organizations
    1. Increased Efficiencies
    2. Overcoming Traditional Organizational Communication Traps
    3. Learning from Mistakes
    4. Preserving Institutional Knowledge
    5. Improving Public Perception and Awareness of Work and Effort
    6. Better Customer Service
    7. Reducing Space Between Leaders and Others
    8. Other Benefits of Showing Work
    9. Organizational Communication Case Study: Nasa’s Monday Notes
    10. Benefits to Organizations?
  3. Workers: What’s In It For You?
    1. Establishing Credibility/Expertise
    2. Raising Your Profile
    3. Improving Performance
    4. Creating Dialogue
    5. Getting Help/Saving Time/Not Reinventing The Wheel
    6. Getting Help: Author’s story
    7. Getting Help: New Ways of Working and Communicating at Yammer
    8. Replacing Résumé with Something More Meaningful
    9. Explaining Your Thinking Helps You Learn
    10. Teaching Others Improves Practice
    11. Reflection Improves Practice
    12. An Aside: Tips for Becoming More Reflective
    13. Exercise 1
    14. Exercise 2
    15. Exercise 3
    16. Paying it Forward
    17. Benefits to You
  4. What Is Knowledge? and Why Do People Share It?
    1. What is Knowledge? Three Views
    2. But Why Would People Share What They Know?
    3. Other Reasons?
    4. True Story: “I Care and Want to Help”
    5. Share is The New Save
    6. And Finally
  5. “This Is How I Do That.”
    1. Topiaries
    2. Doctors in Surgery Wearing Google Glass
    3. Detailed Branching E-Learning Scenario
    4. Cookies Become A Business
    5. Making an RSA-Style Video
    6. “This is What I Do All Day”: Médicins Sans Frontiérs/Doctors Without Borders
    7. “This is How I Spent This Day”: Designing A Mobile APP
    8. “This is What I Do”: The Consultant
    9. “This is How I Decided”: Visual Design Choices
    10. “This is How I Decided”: Yammer
    11. “This is What I Did Today”: Attending A Conference
    12. “This is What I Learned Today”: Attending A Webinar
    13. “This is How I Learned That”: How I Taught Myself...
    14. “This is Why I Learned That”: New Employee Onboarding
    15. “This is How I Learned That”: Using New Web Tools
    16. “This is How A Government Agency Shows its Work”: The UK Ministry of Justice Digital Services Blog
    17. “This is How I Created That”: Matt Guyan
    18. “This is What I Did”: Demofest
    19. “This is What I Did”: How I Solved A Problem
    20. “This is What I Did, and Why”: Bruno Winck and UX Design
    21. “This is How The Collaborative Project Looks”: A Large Aluminum Manufacturer Engages in Narrating Work. Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler Offer an Example in One of Their Presentations.
    22. “This is What I Did”: My Portfolio
    23. “This is What I Can Do”: Résumé
    24. “Here’s Something From My Work I Think Might Be Useful to Others”: David Byrne
    25. “What are You Working on Right This Second?”: Snapshots of Working Days
    26. “Showing Workflow”: 2 Approaches to Organizing A Conference
    27. “Showing Workflow”: Storyboarding My Thesis
    28. “Showing Workflow”: The Evolution of A Painting
    29. “Showing Workflow”: Sketchnoting to Show ... Sketchnoting
    30. “Showing Workflow”: Two Approaches to Planning A Book
    31. “Showing Workflow”: Book Layout
  6. Learning & Development
    1. What’s L&D’s Role?
    2. What Does Learning Look Like?
    3. What Can L&D Do?
    4. For Example?
    5. For Example?
    6. For Example?
    7. Fill New Roles
    8. Support Serendipity
    9. L&D Needs to Narrate Work, Too
    10. Lead By Example
    11. Here’s Your Chance to Show What L&D Can Do
    12. Showing Learning Spawns New Learning
  7. How?
    1. Ship It
    2. Name Things
    3. Platforms, Templates, Formats
    4. How Not to Do it? Don’t Overformalize or Overengineer
    5. Consider The Value of Making Things Public
    6. Tools and Strategies
    7. Video
    8. Remember to Turn the Recorder On
    9. Draw a Picture
    10. Worker Concerns
    11. Evaluating Efforts
    12. Wenger Value-Creation Story Worksheet
    13. Leaders Need to Show Their Work, Too
    14. Case: The Social Coo
    15. Be Honest: Are You Ready? What Do You Need to Do?
    16. What Works? Lessons Learned
    17. Some Realities
    18. When?
    19. Just Do It
    20. The End
    21. Ask The Right Questions
  8. Index
  9. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: Show Your Work
  • Author(s): Jane Bozarth
  • Release date: May 2014
  • Publisher(s): Pfeiffer
  • ISBN: 9781118863626