Show Your Work

Seeking and sensing are essential for the knowledge work we do, and sharing your work is a win/win/win.

Today I’m writing about getting better at what we do at work all day: seeking and sensing … and sharing your work.

I was talking with Richard recently. He's my friend, a surgeon, and an oft-published researcher. We got on the topic of learning at work, and especially the process of integrating what we learn into our day-to-day use.

For me, integration requires creating something—it could be a PowerPoint deck for a meeting, or writing a newsletter, or a plan for a group facilitation event.

Richard agreed! He integrates the same way, through the effort of writing (and re-writing) academic articles, or conceiving of research studies, or developing treatment plans. It's the act of creation that helps us to translate what we know into what we do.

This integration activity is the second step in Harold Jarche's Seek-Sense-Share learning framework.

Where "seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date," "sensing is how we personalize information and use it."

He continues:

"Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing."

Seeking and sensing are how we do our knowledge work jobs, from providing care to operating a department to managing a project. So yes, we already do seeking and sensing implicitly to "do" work, sometimes even all at once (like me as I write this newsletter)—but we probably don't always do so with awareness and intention.

Well, with awareness and intention comes the opportunity to improve. And becoming exceptionally skilled at seeking and sensing are perhaps the most important professional development tasks we have in a knowledge work environment.

So some questions for reflection …

On seeking:

• When you need information, what's your typical approach to finding things out? What are your go-to sources? (Are you playing with AI chatbots?)

• How have you ensured a steady stream of relevant knowledge arrives to your inbox/nightstand/social feeds/etc.?

• How do you incorporate perspectives from other people, such as colleagues, loose connections, or experts outside your team?

On sensing:

• Where do you do your thinking—in a calendar block, on a commute, in the shower, or ... ? (Are you explicitly making time for thinking?)

• What's your approach for putting new knowledge into practice? E.g., chatting about an idea with a colleague, submitting a grant proposal, convincing the team to try a new approach for a month, ...

• How do you process work stuff? Some ideas: calling a co-worker, presenting at tumor board, journaling, sharing the details of the work day with your partner, ...

What about sharing? Aha! Well, if seeking and sensing are the day-to-day activities that ensure meaningful progress at work, sharing makes those efforts go exponential.

Back to Harold:

"Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues."

As I see it, sharing your work is what the dealmakers refer to as a win/win/win.

Win 1: You learn. Sharing your work identifies/reinforces/highlights the lessons you've learned from having done the work. That is, it turns your work into experience you can use again.

Win 2: We learn. Sharing your work gives us the opportunity to put what you've learned to work for us. That is, it turns your work into experience we can use. "On the shoulders of giants," as they say.

Win 3: People connect. Sharing your work puts you and your ideas in the stream. People talk. People comment. People link. People message. Who knows what happens next?

So here's the prompt: What did you learn?

Whether it's a lesson you've picked up in your latest meeting, on a recent project, through your years on the job, or somewhere else entirely ... tell us about it: LinkedIn, team meetings, coffee klatches, happy hour, at the water cooler ...

Everyone is out here achieving! So much success. Keep it up.

The world needs more of your work. ... Here's something else the world needs more of: You telling us how you did it. That's right, we need you to Share Your Work.

Because as Harold Jarche advocates—and these are words I think about at least every other day—"Work is learning and learning is the work."

Now share it with us.

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

Caught the Searching for Sugar Man documentary on a recent flight. What an amazing story!

“Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite: an argument that the status quo must be changed, and it will take steadfast commitment to see the job through. It’s not accepting defeat; it’s accepting the terms of possible victory. Distance runners pace themselves; activists and movements often need to do the same, and to learn from the timelines of earlier campaigns to change the world that have succeeded.” Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change

Where does strategy come from?

“It is more or less unheard of, in American life, for anyone, let alone a woman, to become globally famous as an octogenarian. That it happened to Iris Apfel, the inimitable clotheshorse and tireless style icon … was all the more shocking given the fact that she spent the first eighty-four years of her life as a private citizen.” Iris Apfel Wore Fame Well

How To Work is healthcare-focused work design inspiration to nudge your perspectives and practices into better alignment with the world of work as it is, and away from what it was. Read my take on the tension we’re working through.  

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