I'm going to start working in the open
Note: This is not a New Year's Resolution - it's been weighing on my mind for some time.
Note: SWEET LORD it's 2022.
I've seen mention of "working in the open" here and there for some time now, and whilst I tacitly understood its advantages, I never explored putting it into practice. To roughly explain, working in the open describes workflows and practices that expose your work to other people, rather than keeping it siloed away, and is a cultural practice encouraged in organisations such as the GDS and Mozilla.
Coming to terms with being a Secret Squirrel
Borrowing from the title of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, one of my old bosses used the term "Secret Squirrel" as a semi-affectionate term to describe someone who would work away in secret - showing an aversion to sharing their work or activities, regardless of whether their reasons to do so were nefarious or innocent. I liked the term; it stuck with me and I started using it. But over the past few months the realisation started to dawn on me - I'm a Secret Squirrel myself.
Symptoms include:
- An aversion to sharing work until it is almost done - this means time is lost before feedback can be obtained
- Reluctantance to utilise "async" methods to raise topics of discussion and share what I have been working on - often saving these for scheduled meetings - again, time is lost
The aforementioned reluctance manifests itself in a tendency to use DMs instead of shared Slack channels to communicate. I will tell myself that I make sure the important messages are all in the shared channels, but the fact is, you never really know which messages are important - the most hum-drum messages can sometimes spark useful feedback or conversations you would never have imagined.
...I have a lifelong fear of people believing I am inept/stupid...
So why behave in such a manner? The wisdom of age (Sweet Lord it's 2022) allows you to be more open and honest about yourself, so here we go:
- I have a lifelong fear of people believing I am inept/stupid
- I struggle with unsolicited criticism (initially)
- I react badly when someone offers an alternative approach to the one I had imagined/made progress with
- I prefer in-person conversations to sharing work/raising issues in the reduced-media (text and emoji only) format of Slack/Notion/Docs etc. I am concerned that the reduced media causes misunderstandings, but I am especially afraid that I will receive unfair criticism due to misunderstandings
- Secondary to the fear of looking stupid, a fear of looking inept or even odd by sharing something (blog post, task update) that no-one has any interest in reading
There are caveats and more granularity to these statements of insecurity, but it's pull the band-aid/plaster off time so nuance is out of the window.
Starting to work in the open
Hypotheses
It seems fairly obvious that working in the open should allow faster reaction to issues and tasks by bringing these to the attention of the team earlier, and allowing the team to feedback earlier. There are other advantages that I hypothesise are to be gained from working in this manner:
- Increased understanding and trust
- More feedback and conversations leading to more personal and professional growth
- Shared learning
- Reduced feelings of isolation and increased purpose
I should elaborate on point 3 - In June 2021 I switched from a Project Management role, to a more strategic, management position. In a PM role you are part of a team that is working towards the same goal for the majority of your working hours. In a strategic role, the goals are higher-level, and the teams are a bit more nebulous and meet more infrequently to discuss the goals. One thing that I found from this were increased feelings of isolation and sometimes a difficulty staying motivated to achieve targets. The longer timescales often involved in achieving stratgeic goals also makes progress harder to perceive and, as a result, a sense of purpose harder to maintain.
Putting it into practice
I am going to start off by making a few obvious changes that move towards being more open with my work, and seeing what results they produce.
- Switching my blogging approach from content production to diarising
- Taking the same, diarising approach at work
- Releasing work for review earlier
- Stopping using DMs in Slack, unless it is appropriate to do so (e.g. personal reasons/sensitive information)
By switching from "content production" to diarising, I am changing the purpose of my blog posts from being something sharable e.g. "look at what I did", or "here's how you do this", to "here's what I did this week" and more importantly "here's what I learned this week". This may seem a negative move as I am making what I produce less helpful for other people, and more therapeutic for me - keeping a diary is a great way of sense-making, gathering thoughts, tracking progress and reiterating goals. Whilst my content will end up being less helpful (and I also lack the confidence to write posts offering advice or solutions anwyway), what it allows is the production of more content and as a result, the possibility of more conversations starting: I am moving from producing answers, to producing questions.
It's been 1 day since I decided to do this, and already I've put all 4 of those points into action; let's see if I can maintain the behaviours, and let's see what results come from them if I can keep it up!
