Work Out Loud Week

Apparently this week (9-15 June) is Work Out Loud Week for this one week we are all encouraged to share our work.  Conveniently most of the blog posts this week involved some degree of sharing my week, which normally ends today.  Unfortunately I had a bit of a body crash on Wednesday so I decided to take a rest day on Thursday and spend some time working today (Friday) instead.

I’m currently working with Stu and Graham trying to shape up a strategy and planning presentation deck.  It’s an important task and with that importance comes the need to get the ‘words right’.  This need for attention to detail, is never more important than when working on the one slide summaries of scope, accountabilities and approach.  It’s hard work as we spend hours debating a single bullet point to make sure that every word earns it’s place, is clear, accurate and not open to misinterpretation.  I hate this kind of fine tuning, but what are the alternatives to slides, well maybe …

1. we could record audio/video to go with the slides, instead of a bullet point we could substitute a discussion
2. we could talk to people directly, preferably one to one, using the slide just to provide a structure to the conversations
3. we could write a document, expanding on each bullet point

Unfortunately at the end of the day, we will still need these key slides, slides will get distributed, documents won’t get read, slides later in the pack will be skimmed or ignored, video won’t get watched.  Conversation works best, but if everyone in the team has a different conversation because they lack the slide content to keep them on message, we get a confused understanding of accountability, scope and approach spreading uncontrollably.

So unfortunately after this ramble we are back to spending a few hours wordsmithing today:

wordsmithing (uncountable)

1. The making of changes to a text to improve clarity and style, as opposed to content.

   We’ve drafted an agreement, but there’s still a bit of wordsmithing left to do.

One of the things that I like most about blogging is this lack of collaborative wordsmithing, I can speak in my own voice, on topics that are of interest to me, without the need for agreement. Critically I can also set the quality bar low enough for me to churn out a post a day during a relaxing, early morning, coffee shop stop off.

In honour of  ‘working out loud week’ I’ve added a new category to my blog, just for those crazy enough to want to read my recent working out loud posts, I’m going to find it useful anyway.

The photo is of a lovely little bridge over the canal that borders the Preston Guild Wheel cycle track, a spent 40 minutes riding along this track yesterday on my Brompton while I was waiting for Anna to finish at Hospital