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Friday, November 24, 2017

My experience of facilitating and being a member of my 2nd 12-Week Working Out Loud (WOL) Circle

… the song below played randomly as I was writing this summary, the lyrics are so appropriate …

Introduction

I started my 2nd WOL circle on 11 September and completed it on 27 November 2017. This, like the first one, has been another amazing journey.

This circle came after my 1st global/virtual WOL circle (January to March 2017, see blog post of my experience) and after running a 12-week global/virtual book club that read and applied “Designing Your Life” (May to July 2017).

For those that are new to Working Out Loud circles, this page lists a set of resources relating to working out loud and working out loud circles.

I have documented my experience under the following headings:-

  • Recruiting the circle
  • The circle calls/meetings
  • My Goal including selection and assessment of achievement
  • Highlights and Deliverables (non-goal-related)
  • Reflections on the process
  • My next steps including my 3rd circle

Recruiting the circle

For those of us needing to do virtual circles, recruitment is probably the hardest challenge in running such a circle. How do you suss out people who will show up and those who will drop out even before you start and those who ultimately do not respond to Facebook messages, Twitter DMs and emails etc. Ideally, as per best practice, you need 5 people showing up ready to discuss that week’s exercises from the circle guides.

Another challenge when you have a group of interested people is sorting out a time when everybody can make the call/meeting slot each week especially if you have multiple time zones.

This time round while thinking about doing a 2nd circle, I was keen to do some learning (any learning!) with Rita (Zonius) given her successful work with ESNs and even more so when I found out she was starting up on her own. I had first “met” Rita via the #ESNchat on Twitter when she was a contributor and then she became a co-host and in parallel with that Rita agreed to do a “Designing Your Life” Life Design Conversation with me and her enthusiasm for her work was highly attractive and contagious when we did that call. Rita agreed to do a circle with me and then off I went recruiting.

I adopted the same approach to recruiting this circle as I did my 1st one – public invites in the WOL FB group and on Twitter and then specific invitations as the opportunities arose.

Inevitably, people start being excluded because of the time as a facilitator you finally decide upon. For this circle, I decided to cave in and do a time that was far from ideal for me to make sure that the circle of 5 could run.

I have still never said “no” to anyone wanting to join a circle that I am facilitating.

The circle calls/meetings

My 2nd circle, like the 1st (!), was made up of an amazing group of people.


Ben Elias, @ideocial, entrepreneur, Microsoft Yammer MVP
Rita Zonius, @RitaZonius, Director, The Enterprise Social Engineer

Madu Ratnayake, @MaduRatnayake, Executive Vice President, CIO, Virtusa

David Wallace, @Organicwal, Learning and Development Advisor (Leadership and Management), Queen Mary University of London
Simon Fogg, @srjf, Operational Support, Claritas Solutions

As in my 1st circle, we used Zoom for the weekly video calls and Slack for all correspondence, circle updates and hosting the video files from the calls for those that were unable to be present on a particular call. I remain of the view that this combination of services is ideal for anyone looking to host a virtual circle on the internet for free.

The goals of the individuals in the group including increasing blogging frequency, widening the organisation’s coaching culture, living and working in a family-friendly sustainable way, producing a business plan and deepening relationships with colleagues.

Each circle call was productive with deep conversations in each one – as well as being fun (!) at the same time. Each of us was present in a majority of the calls. A number of subjects that were covered in the calls directly impacted all of us given the work that we were all actively engaged in.

Three of the calls were 1:1 and it was good for me personally to spend an hour with Madu, Dave and Ben separately doing a deep dive on their goals and anything else they wanted to talk about in a way that would not have been possible in the wider circle for airtime reasons if we had all been present.

I spoke about this in the call that was published on YouTube for the world to see but I am finding that the exercises in the circle guides warrant repeat completing if you do more than one circle especially given that your goal should be different in each circle.

I did not complete all the exercises for time reasons. This was the case also for others in the circle but each call covered in-depth the main themes of the week.

I continue to fail at pressing record every time we do a call so if you are ever in a call with me that I am down to record you need to make sure I do – I need telling!

I still love seeing photos of any and all WOL circles in full flow. This is one of our gang …

My Goal including assessment of achievement

My goal in this circle was:

"To read Jane Bozarth's "Show Your Work" book in 10 weeks, apply it by making notes of the book and adding my perspective and thoughts to those notes and then actually showing my work during the 10 weeks. This will include seeking feedback on that work and looking for co-creation opportunities with a view to actually co-creating products in weeks 7-9."

For this goal, I recruited a number of people into a virtual book club with a reading plan and a weekly schedule (see the invite). There were 10 people who signed-up but only 1 other person read the book and posted their thoughts in a Slack team for this club. I was disappointed by this response but was glad that one other person engaged in the process. I completed reading the book, making notes of each chapter including some of my own thoughts on the content and posted that content in both the book club and circle Slack teams. See this blog post.

The book certainly challenges you positively to work out loud and share your work and specifically emphasises the power of showing your work as it goes through any creation process and not just when you have the finished product. It makes the point that others can learn more by seeing the intermediate steps and not just the final article.

I found the following quote by Atul Gawande memorable and inspirational about writing. I need to act on this.

It was also good to read about NASA’s Daily Notes ….

and about this former-CEO’s prolific blogging over the long haul …

I would highly recommend Jane’s book to stretch your mind about what work can be shared. I use the same wording as I do for making contributions (in WOL-speak) and that is we are just constrained in our sharing of our work only by the limits of our own creativity.

I have made more of a concerted effort to showing my work in process since reading the book.

Examples include this process for setting up a Twitter chat …

… result of an All Age Worship planning session for a public gathering on Sunday 10 December 2017 …

.. the briefing note for the last circle call as it appears in Slack …

… my core value shared on World Values Day …

Whilst this is all positive, I failed with the co-creation part of my goal. I tried to get some co-creators to do a Human-Voiced Resume [aka CV] (per Liz Ryan’s Reinvention Roadmap) together. I hate doing CVs as they are needed so rarely. They remind me of “distress purchases” in the marketing world. This exercise seemed to be a way of adding some excitement in doing one and also an exercise in storytelling. I could see this practice being useful for freelancers too in producing their credentials-type documents/copy. More on co-creation in the next steps section.

Highlights and Deliverables (non-goal-related)

A summary list of what else I did while my 2nd WOL circle was running:-

  1. Did Snapchat video intro to me and posted it

  2. Played and took notes of a personal brand podcast that came to me via Kelly O'Conor in New York who passed it me after we discussed this in a 1:1 Designing Your Life Life Design convo earlier in the year

  3. Did the 50 Facts About Me exercise but with brief title, a para and a video for each fact.

  4. Had a lengthy video call with a person in Germany about all things old and new about work after that person saw a specific named individual in my 50 Facts piece.
  5. Did the Exercise: “A letter from your future self" - Week 7 - Be Purposeful. Listing here so I do something about it! I forgot I did this!
  6. Did the first step in Liz Ryan’s Human-Voiced Resume process, produced a Jobs Held Summary, listing Job Title/Role, Employer, Start Date, End Date, Time in Role, Time at
    Employer, Reason for Leaving Role
  7. I met Rita in person! She came to see us at our home in Bradford, UK, while she was over in London from Australia! (photo album including pics of us at Salts Mill which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as pics of the book that Rita co-authored “Social technologies in business” as an example of the new ways of working meeting the old ways and physical places of working). Rita was in London and New York for 4 weeks while we were circling.
  8. I was asked by Isabel de Clercq, the lead author, to interview L&D pro Mathias Vermeulen, one of 15 co-authors of the book "Social technologies in business | connect | share | lead" that was published earlier this year.



  9. Via a conversation in the WOL FB group, I collated my responses in a single blog post: Considerations when Recruiting for a Working Out Loud Circle
  10. Curated My Top Ten Resources for Encouraging People To Actually Work Out Loud (as at 6 November 2017)
  11. The circle used its week 10 call to chat about working out loud and working out loud circles and we published the video, recorded in a single take,  on YouTube for the world to watch:



  12. Produced an 11 part blog post series “The Hygge Manifesto meets Working Out Loud Circles” for International Working Out Loud Week.
  13. Stumbled over the “Book: “The Project Manager: Life is a Project”; Amy Hamilton while doing a WOL circle exercise. Amy is defo a kindred spirit!



  14. Created a blog post about Twitter Chats
  15. Replied to Rachel (Happe)’s WOL FB post about WOL-ing in different communities with my personal take on content publishing.


Reflections on the process

These are still as per my first experience of doing a WOL circle.

I can still see me being a serial WOL circler. Doing a WOL circle is an incredible way to learn new skills and to work on a personal goal over a 12-week period.

I am comfortable facilitating a 5-person WOL circle but not in a complacent way. A WOL circle needs to go wherever the conversation takes it within the broad structure that the facilitator has set.

The exercises need to be done by all the circle to maximise the learning and the contributions from the circle.

The goal of each person in the circle should be stated and clear (eventually but the earlier the better!) so that each member of the circle can articulate what all the circle goals are. This will allow everyone to be supported by everyone else in the circle.

The criteria of a goal that states the goal must be something that you cannot do on your own remains a challenge for me and others. It is very easy – too easy and a cop out - to simply pick a goal you can do on your own.

Recruitment and picking a time slot are the parts of the process I hate the most where I am looking for a global group of people that I do not know.

I do not know what it is like to facilitate a circle without being an active participant in the circle I.e. having a goal and doing the exercises but I remain a person who enjoys (trying to) lead by example.

My next steps including my 3rd circle

The final 4 or so weeks of my 2nd WOL circle have been impacted by two amazing events.

Getting access to Workplace by Facebook

The first has distracted me from concentrating fully on this circle’s activities but has also been a development opportunity and enabled me to work out loud and share my work.

When contemplating me facilitating and doing a 3rd circle. I had a crazy idea of maybe trying to do it on the Workplace by Facebook platform as a novelty and to keep me fresh while circling as well as using a new platform thereby adding to what I was learning. It quickly became apparent that this was not possible as an individual. You needed to be a company, charity, educational establishment or someone with a non-gmail etc email account. I did seek access via some circle-like connecting with a UK FB executive with no immediate success. I proceeded by asking for help via this initial post in the WOL FB group asking if anyone could help me get free trial access to running a circle on Workplace by Facebook.

A few days later in the regular weekly #ESNchat, the theme was “bring your own question” and then this happened in response to a tweet of mine …

I rapidly started playing with Workplace to see if I could rapidly configure the groups as per channels in Slack. Once I was happy this was not complex, I started the recruitment process clear in my own mind that this would be a real and pure Working Out Loud circle as priority 1 but I was conscious that there would be a number of people who may jump at the chance of playing with and evaluating Workplace. I made this clear in a public invite that went first in the WOL FB group and then in a public tweet. See Invitation to be part of a WOL Circle being run on Workplace by Facebook in Q1 2018.

After a number of expressions of interest, I then started asking people as I saw their tweets. These included people who were listed in my 1st WOL Circle “to contact” list.

As someone new to ESNs, and only really playing with them as we do not use them at work, I was conscious that the onboarding process was important to try to ensure that people knew what they were doing given that for all of us as soon as you login to Workplace it is a whole new world even though the UI is directly comparable to the consumer version of Facebook. This has been through a few iterations. See Instructions for those being setup in the WOL Circle on Workplace by Facebook being facilitated by Simon Fogg. in Q1 2018.

I originally envisaged this being a 5-person circle so I set up the following:-

  • a Goal group for each user (these are as per FB groups in the consumer product) for each person’s goal that can be used by the circle for all info relating to that person’s goal
  • a group for each of the 12 weeks of the circle (1st call w/c 8 January 2018)
  • Resources groups for each of the following subjects
    • Zoom – how to use etc
    • Workplace – how to use etc
    • WOL – articles, videos about WOL
    • General – any other content that is useful to the circle on any subject – my fave group!!

You automatically get a profile page for each user.

I made each group open and made them default groups so that each time I set up a user they were automatically added to the groups. This was to minimise my admin. At this point I was up to double figures for the numbers of users!

Some early feedback from the users …

“Hey all - i'm a little confused. I can't goal planning worksheets (posted in my Goal group) you mentioned on my first post Simon Fogg. If i'm super honest i'm finding the set up pretty overwhelming and confusing. There doesn't seem to be a flow. Perhaps my WOL goal should be to get my head around facebook. I just seem to click from thing to thing HELP!”

“Hi Simon, sorry. This is so much information, interaction and links and postings... I am overwhelmed.”

As in my work life, I take all user feedback seriously, validate it and then act on it as appropriate.

The main thing I have done is created a Directory-type pinned post in the community group with links to all our groups:

Fiona Michaux comes into my life

A couple of months back I submitted my core value for World Values Day:

To fully set this next story up, I previously posted the following text in my Goal group for the next circle:

  1. In this 2nd circle, I struggled to find people to co-create content with even though I started a virtual book club in parallel with the circle - only 1 other person read Jane Bozarth's "Show Your Work" book with me despite 10+ people registering.
  2. The book "Deep Work" by Cal Newport (see vid) has been on my list for a while and I was thinking that doing yet another book was a bit of a cheat if I did that as my goal in the 3rd circle.
  3. I did the One Word "thing" this year - my word was "discipline" - for the first time and had already started thinking I would use the word "professionalism" as my guiding light in 2018.
  4. I am getting more and more involved with communities as a subject and getting more passionate about actually doing this for real. This has also involved two Life Design convos with 2 influential community managers - 1 in Oz (Rita), 1 in USA (Kelly) - while I was doing the Designing Your Life book club.
  5. I know and need to start blogging more to be more influential.
  6. I know that Working Out Loud and Working Out Loud circles are big in Germany and that Bosch have an amazing community etc programme.

.... and then a month later this tweet thread happened ... and people say Twitter, WOL etc is a waste of time etc !!

…. the name rang a bell but this was not someone I had exchanged lots of tweets with …

We then had an immediate phone call chatting about this possibility and we both agreed immediately that we would do it! The irony of Fiona’s word probably being “focus” is not lost on me! I may do “focus” as my word … either way, definitely hoping that some of Fiona’s focus rubs off on me!!

This then started me thinking. I have access to Workplace why don’t Fiona and I use that platform for our collaboration. I quickly created a group in Workplace with graphics:

Since then we have seen this tweet that is a great summary of what we will be seeking to do:

This “change” started me thinking about access controls in Workplace. We now have a user who is not part of the circle. I did ask her! (and have no issue with Fiona not being n the circle!). So I now needed to make all the circle-related and goal-related groups closed to the members and I created a closed group for the work that Fiona and I would do on our One Word 2018 project. Part of that may form my goal for the circle.

I went on to delete and recreate all the all the goal and circle week groups to change them from Open (within this community) groups to Closed (access to named users) groups.

What this now also means is that if anyone else wants to work on a circle goal collaboratively on this platform with people not in the circle, they can do that if they let me know who the user is etc and I would set them up.

I left all the other groups I created for resources, queries etc as they were and are available to all users in the community not just the circle users.

This also means that we get to test Workplace in more work-like ways with multiple teams etc.

I then took the next leap in my mind which was now that I can accommodate multiple closed teams. I thought about what the impact would be of hosting other circles on Workplace that I was not a part of nor facilitating. Given that creating groups and assigning users takes time, I decided to delete 11 of the 12 WOL Circle Week groups and just left one that I cunningly titled “Circle A”. This was probably the right thing to do so circle members do not always have to remember what week something needs to go in or where they posted something previously. I am glad I caught this early. There is no way to convert Open Groups to Closed Groups which is why I had to delete and recreate the relevant groups.

I then offered to host other people’s virtual/physical circles on Workplace by Facebook with explanation, benefits etc in this WOL FB post.

No one has yet taken up my offer to put their circle on to Workplace but there is still time. I expect to have access to Workplace until at least the end of March 2018.

My Third WOL Circle

This year, my first full year of knowing about WOL and being in WOL circles, has been marked more than any other of my 55 years by acting on instinct and promptings as I live my life. Earlier in the year, I came across Mel Robbins’ “5-Second Rule” (podcast, Google Books entry). This is now uppermost in my mind when prompted by anything and has revolutionised my life. Life truly is an adventure once more.

At the time of writing, there are 20 of us registered on Workplace, 19 in the circle and Fiona. This is broken down as:

  • 4 - Germany (includes Fiona)
  • 3 - UK
  • 3 - USA
  • 2 - Australia (including a nomad travelling around the country), Belgium, New Zealand
  • 1 - Canada, Switzerland
  • and 2 nomads: 1 from UK now travelling in SE Asia, 1 from the Netherlands now in Columbia

I have no idea currently how this will work. I am aware that 19 is more than 5 !!

I do/did not want to say no to anyone.

I want(ed) to take full advantage of the opportunity to use Workplace.

I made it clear in the invite that this would not be a “normal” WOL circle.

On my lunchtime walk at work on Wednesday, I got a strong “picture” in my head of our WOL circle  Workplace community being like a Base Camp (love the list of characteristics of a base camp in this LinkedIn post; I am also aware that there is a web service called Basecamp). As we congregate from around the world over the next few weeks, sort out time availabilities and agree how we want to play this, there may be multiple groups that go off in each week of the circle on their own trek that week and come back to tell their stories.

Finally

A big shoutout to Ben, Dave, Madu and Rita for making this a memorable circle to be a part of and for their encouragement. It was great spending time with all of you on this learning adventure. And wishing you all the best in your respective careers and lives. That is all sounding very final but I know you are all a tweet away.


…. and so … back to the tiger ….

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